Graphic Design, Blank Pages, & Sharpies

Interacting_with_Women_Study_300, originally uploaded by Mathew Mitchell.

Whenever you want to create a new presentation it's easy to start off using something like PowerPoint or Keynote. There are clearly times where that's the best approach. However, in general, I like the blank page approach where you start with a literal blank page. I prefer the homely piece of paper, but a blank slide in presentation software can also work quite nicely.

What you see above is an example of a rather complicated visual for statistics. This visual was used as part of a multimedia presentation on calculating effect size (Cohen's d to be specific). Below you can download the full presentation that includes a movie and supporting documents (such as the original article the data came from).

You can click on the image above. When you click you'll then be taken to my account in Flickr (free versions are easy to sign up for). When you are in Flickr you'll still see a smallish image, but just above the image you'll see several icons that give you options for how you interact with the image. Click on the "all sizes" button. You'll then be taken to a page where you can see this image in a variety of sizes: including quite bit versions. Pretty cool! Using this technique (I know I'm leaving out the details), one can present a little "preview" image and still let your learners see the full big image.

The movie itself is mainly composed of scanned images. Ironically I then "scan" the scans by zooming in closer to certain sections of the page as the video progresses. The download is 47 Mb.

effect size revisited movie