Index Cards & Mind Mapping to Organize a Presentation

I'm in the process of developing an online visual explanation SlideShare presentation about plastic water bottles and ocean pollution for my blog SaveTheOcean (and to share with other Ocean advocacy organizations). I've liked both Cliff Atkinson's and Nancy Duarte's presentation development methodologies, but for some reason have still felt the need to combine elements of both and customize.

Two tools that I'm finding to be really useful are a stack of index cards and mind mapping software (I'm using Nova Mind). The index cards are great for capturing key points in the brainstorming phase. In Nancy's workshop at VizThink recently she had us use post-it notes, but personally I'm finding that index cards are easier to use. I don't have a big whiteboard or wall to organize them all so I can just lay out my index cards on a table or the floor and rearrange as needed, then pack them all up in order when I need the space for something else.

At a certain point, the index cards started getting to be a bit unwieldy so I created a mind map in NovaMind to continue working on the structure of the presentation. I think any of the presentation gurus will tell you that defining your presentation content and structuring it all outside of PowerPoint or Keynote is a best practice. So, next time you have a presentation to develop, hold off on opening up PowerPoint, get some index cards and some mind mapping software (free versions are readily available if you don't have any) and give it a try.

An example of the mind map I'm using to develop my presentation is shown below. It's still a work in progress with more to flesh out.

Slide:ology

I just finished Nancy Duarte's book, Slide:ology. I've recently become interested in presentation development, not because I give many presentations anymore, but primarily because I think presentations shared online through services like Slideshare have the potential to be good vehicles for visual explanations.

My overall impression of the book? Excellent! It should be required reading for anyone who has to develop or give presentations. She starts with an overview of the need for better presentations, discusses some basic prerequisites like identifying audience needs and touches on ideation and story development briefly. The majority of the book though focuses on design aspects of presentations and slides. Lots of good, useful information. I outlined the basic content of the book in a mind map, below. Take a look then buy the book.

Back of the Napkin Digital Mind Map

After creating a hand sketched Back of the Napkin mind map awhile back, I wanted to create it in a digital format that I could easily refer to. Dan Roam recently made some of his tools downloadable on his website, so I decided to create a Flash-based mind map with links to Dan's PDFs. Click on the image below to see the result.

Cool Data Visualization Mind Maps

Last night I was googling and checking out web sites about data visualization. Tons of really cool data visualization stuff out there that I'll have to blog about in another post. But one of the most intriguing to me was the Web Trends mind map from Information Architects. I've seen this covered already on a few other visual thinking blogs, but I think it's cool enough to mention it again.


Visit the Web Trends map here

You can download various size, print out a big poster size or they even have it as a web page. They've been doing this for a few years ago. Personally I think I like last year's version a little better. Not quite as clean, but less data and easier to read.