Partner Article

Like a Brick Wrapped in Velvet

With Dr Simon Raybould, Curved Vision Theatre

This is a theme I’ve mentioned before but it bears repeating. It’s a really bad idea to confuse the layout of your presentation with the content. At Curved Vision we have a term, “Communication Impotence”, which sums up what we see all too often – people who are fearful of doing/writing their presentation resort to using toys, gadgets, gimmicks and things to “do their job for them”.

They can spend ages faffing-on about the exact choice of font and its size and spend more time doing that than actually thinking about the words that are in that paragraph! They can spend all their time using machinery and technology to do what’s best done by a human body. They can… you get the idea, I’m sure.ˆ As a result, their presentations are often rushed to completion at the last minute, ill thought out and – from the audience’s point of view – alienating and un-satisfactory.

To help people get around this Communication Impotence approach, we advocate a simple two-step system, to focus people’s minds on their content and then the presentation style: we use the shorthand phrase “Like a Brick Wrapped in Velvet”.

Your content should be like a brick; make it first, make it simple; make it easy to grasp and to use; giving “serious stopping power”. Then wrap it in velvet – design your presentation around it; make it smooth; make it easy to grasp; make it easy to hold and without rough edges. Make something people want to pick up and hold!

The “velvet brick” approach – along with a massive amount of other information on how to give business presentations is now written up formally. Readers of the bdaily can get their own ebook copy here. You can read a little more about our style on the site and get it downloaded to your computer with a few mouse-clicks. Enjoy!

As always, questions, comments and requests to me at sme@curved-vision.co.uk

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .