Making Visual Agenda

Today let’s visualize so commonly used "Agenda slide" or "Table of Content".

Why not make it more visual? Check my proposals of visual agenda below. I created them using standard shapes from PowerPoint and infoDiagram’s handwritten icons (by the way, you can get a toolbox of agenda elements on our infoDiagram icons webpage).

Such visual agenda can be used not only in slides presentations, but also books, e-books or longer blog posts.

Examples of creating visual agenda

Here is another alternative visual agenda we designed for our training. This visual shows also timing.

How I designed this visualization?

Firstly a brief visualization analysis: agenda shows process, usually the linear one. A way for showing such process can be flow chart or a line. Once you have basic building blocks defined, it’s easy to extend the agenda by new sections. At the end I would recommend to align centrally all the agenda elements and group them (e.g. using shortcut in PowerPoint 2007/2010: Ctrl+Shift+G). 

Visual agenda can be used also as interesting transition slide or nice progress indicator, as well. Just change it’s size and highlight different element, for example this way:

Five Tips for Coping with Uncertainty and Finding Opportunity (R. Kanter, HBR)

After reading another interesting blog post by Rosabeth Moss Kanter writing from Harvard Business Review, I thought this is a good material for adding simple visualizations. 

Visualisation and design elements (free to buy): http://www.infodiagram.com/ 

How I designed this visualization?

The text had clear 5 clearly separated points, so I searched for visual metaphor for each one:

• 1st point talked about providing a path – for which the block process diagram sketch is just perfect. Adding scribble filling represents "today we stand here" statement. I added two versions of this little information diagram, the simple ones with 3 blocks only and the more complex one showing also possible forks and alternative paths. 
• 2nd point was about  repair – so let’s add there a wrench .
• 3rd concerned creativity and brainstorming for which a light bulb is simple and well- recognized symbol.
• 4th showing appreciation was represented by giving small gift (alternatively I thought about icon of an award)
• 5th was about reminding people values and purpose. Such abstract terms are not so easy to represent. I considered using symbol of scales or figure heading somewhere forward. Finally I decided to use target (bullseye). It is maybe a bit cliche, but well readable symbol of having a goal.

I was thinking whether not to add visualization for the whole blog post ("uncertainty" could be presented as lightning icon, or figure with question mark). However, the more visuals would add to complexity. The main message (5 pieces of advice) would be weaken. After all the uncertainity is not the key issue here, but how to cope with it. 

1 message rule (Prezentio's Rules of good presentation)

This is visualization from our slide design training where I was illustrating  "1 = A+B+C" Rule  from Nine Presentation Hints (by Prezentio.com):

"Have one main message to pass. No more, no less :). A single message you want your listeners to remember after the presentation. Think it over, what is the one point that should stay in their heads. Then make your whole presentation to support this point."



Visualisation and design elements (free to buy): http://www.infodiagram.com/ 

  How I designed it?

This was rather fast and simple. There were only two things to visualize: structure of presentation and their common message:

• Structure of presentation, represented by sequence of slides: I choosed to show whole presentation from bird view, to underline „What’s a big picture” idea. Showing it as a long line of slides didn’t look good – it didn’t fit on screen on one side :) and when looking at last slide, you lost view on the first slide. So it was better to "break the lines", and show it as more compact shape.
• Illustrating one message that all elements should support – I have chosen the curly brackets because it nicely fit the empty space on right side. Eventually I could make a big marker circle around the slides.

Every successful case is a special case (Seth Godin blog)

Illustrating main message of Seth Godin's blog post "Every successful case is a special case" (original post is here).

Visualisation and design elements (free to buy): www.InfoDiagram.com 

 How I designed it?

When reading and analyzing the Seth's blog, I noticed that intersection of various business types is a key message here, worth to underline by visualization. Well, good old Venn diagram is ideal for this purpose - showing an intersection.

I played a bit with ways showing "difference". I tried to use different shapes and different colors (one at a time, to keep consistency):

However, the result looked too heavy, too complex to read fast. So I finally selected the most simple – the same oval shapes, where difference is expressed only in writing. 

I hope you enjoy it.

Four Reasons Any Action Is Better than None (R. Kanter), extended HowTo

Illustrating core ideas from Harvard Business Review article "Four Reasons Any Action Is Better than None" by Rosabeth Moss Kanter (original article here).

Visualisation and design elements (free to buy): www.InfoDiagram.com 

How I designed it?
After printing article on paper, firstly I identified basic structure of the article: there were four main messages, clearly separated. In each part I underlined its keywords:

• part 1: "small wins pave a way for bigger wins", "one win at a time"
• part 2: "in pieces", "single step ... manageable", "take one more action"
• part 3: "forget perfection" 
• part 4: "actions produce momentum", "activate potential to support actions"

Here I had little trouble to clearly distinguish points 1 and 2, which are kind of similar. 
Afterwards I looked for keyword synonyms and metaphors: 

• a way - a road, move ahead, arrow
• from small to big, synergy - integration, puzzles, 
• cumulative - pile, bricks...
• not perfect - fuzzy, blurred, inexact match of sharp objects (arrows perhaps) ...  
• momentum - ball rolling ...

Then I selected metaphors that could be simply visualized: arrow, bricks, ball. 

Finally I drawed it together using shapes and icons from our InfoDiagram collection, not forgetting about good-design rules:  show reading direction, highlight key parts and keep rest as background, enough empty space and maintain consistency (limit colors, one style, homogeneous sizes and shapes).

What’s the use case? (Seth Godin blog)

Visualization of an excellent Seth Godin blog post "What's the use case"
(original blog here).

Visualisation and design elements (free to buy): www.InfoDiagram.com 

Why visualization by diagrams?

We speak diagrams instead of words here: 

Visualisation and design elements (free to buy): www.InfoDiagram.com