Lessons from Scott McCloud - Part 1: Communication
With such an enormous influence upon my way of thinking, I thought that I would share some thoughts from Scott McCloud's outstanding book Understanding Comics. The parallels between his definition of 'Sequential Art' and developing great presentations are uncanny.
It should be noted that the thoughts written below, barring a few tweaks for reference to presentations, are in Scott's words. Buy his book, devour its content, and your presentations will never be the same again.
All media of communication [of which
presentations in a business setting firmly sit] are a by-product of our sad
inability to communicate directly between minds. Sad, because nearly all
problems in human history stem from that inability. Each medium serves as a
bridge between minds. Media converts thoughts into forms that can traverse the
physical world and be re-converted by one or more senses back into thoughts. In
presentations the conversion follows a path from mind to hand to paper [sometimes] to screen [in the majority] to eye to mind. Ideally the presenter’s
messages will run this gauntlet without being affected by it, but in practice
this is rarely the case. The messages and the presentation we ‘see’ in our mind
will never be seen in their entirety by anyone else, no matter how hard we try.
The mastery of presentations is the degree to which that internal ‘sight’ can
be increased, the degree to which the presenter’s ideas survive the journey.
The wall of ignorance that prevents so many
human beings from seeing each other clearly can only be breached by
communication. And communication is only effective when we understand the forms
that communication can take. Art, and especially sequential art, is a
significant communication tool for the business presenter.
Art is any human activity which doesn’t
grow out of either of our species two basic instincts: survival and
reproduction. In almost everything we do there is at least an element of art. Sequential
art, in particular, is defined as “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in
deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an
aesthetic response in the viewer.” (p.9) Think ‘comic books’ here and you can’t
go far wrong. And if you think about presentations and compare your thoughts to
the definition of sequential art, you’ll realize that they’re essentially the
same thing.
Pictures in sequence are an excellent
communication tool. By creating a sequence with two or more images, we are
endowing them with a single overriding identity, and forcing the viewer to
consider them as a whole. Taken individually, pictures are merely that –
pictures. But when taken as a sequence, even a sequence of only two, the art of
the image is transformed into something more – the art of storytelling. And
storytelling is fundamental to delivering a superb business presentation.
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