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T H E S E C O N D W A V E

JIM HARVEY & LESLEY BARRINGER

jim-harvey.com | Pg. 2 Jim Harvey 2013

The honeymoon is over 3

The Second Wave - convincing the early majority 7

Establishing the wider case for Prezi 8

Use Prezi with skill 10

Use Prezis big picture possibilities to make a great first impression 11

Remove sickness from the Prezi vocabulary by reducing spinning, zooming and panning 12

Understand visual structure and layout 14

Use templates to help you hit the ground running 18

Contents


The honeymoon is over

3 years ago, Prezi was new. Just using Prezi, even in its earliest, most limited form, could help you stand out from the PowerPoint crowd. Not anymore. Most people in advertising, marketing and media circles in Europe have now heard of Prezi, and many have already formed an opinion about it. For many its become a zooming, spinning, sick-making clich; something that works against the presenter before theyve even started speaking. How has this happened? What can we do about it?

Innovators and early adopters

Its simple. Using Everett Rogers Diffusion of Innovation theory we can see why we are where we are with Prezi today.

The Diffusion of innovaTion

Prezi - The Second Wave


Prezi was a new product back in 2009, breaking into a static market dominated by one product, PowerPoint. The innovative tool gained traction with a few innovators and early adopters, and a cult was formed. We loved the possibilities of the tool, if not the tool itself, and we felt like we were part of a team. The geeks at Prezi and us, the users, bonding together to find a voice, a space and a use for Prezi in this slide-dominated, Microsoft world.

And we did succeed, didnt we? We experimented, made mistakes, had great triumphs, and made Prezi, sometimes a creaky and limited presentation toy, a real option for business presenters. But our enthusiasm made us blind, sometimes, to the weaknesses in Prezi.

Prezi had no built-in visual structure - templates, slides, layouts, paths, fonts, font regulation and sizing. That came as a standard part of PowerPoint. There was almost no such structure provided in Prezi. You got the canvas, and that was that. Everything else you had to create; frame by frustrating frame; path-point by agonizing path-point. Prezi was also (in my view) less intuitive than PowerPoint and harder to learn to use well.

But Prezi caught something in the imagination of students, academics, creative types, innovators and people who were looking for an alternative. It was an instant hit with a very small slice of the population.

I first blogged about it in 2009, and used it for my first pitch in the real world in October of that year. My thoughts then, can be summarised as follows:

Obviously, Prezi is not as broad, flexible, integrated or widely used as Bills much derided package, so its nowhere near PowerPoint as the default option for corporates, but as an expert user of PowerPoint, I could do some things much more easily and powerfully with this little gem, and there are times that Id choose to use it, without question, simply because Prezis starting position is so different.

But I was not uncritical. I thought the tool was unsophisticated, glitchy and full of challenges for the would-be advocate. By 2010 I was saying this:

Prezi vs PowerPoinT



It is good and offers a new way of thinking about presenting ideas in work and life.

Its not Microsoft - and as we know thats enough for some people to go crazy about something that is not yet proven technology. But it does have promise.

People confuse the medium with the message - i.e. most presentations at work are crap, most presenters use PowerPoint, therefore PowerPoint is crap and anything new must be better Logic flawed all through.

Will Prezi help you make a better presentation next time you get up to speak?

No. Crap presenters will still present badly with Prezi, maybe even worse because theres less structure to follow than in a PPT template. But if youre good at building and telling stories; if you have a clear point to make; if you loathe bullet slides; then maybe it will help a little. For you creative types, thought leaders, designers, poets, CEOs who want to woo investors, show-offs, me, and people with a little bit of flair for the new and dangerous you will want to have a go anyway. So enjoy the experience

Over the next three and a half years Prezi has worked incredibly hard to stay ahead of the chasing critics and behind the existing users and fans. Theyve listened to all kinds of people, even me, and theyve created a much more rounded, usable and commercial presentation application. So well done to them and in trying to make a sustainable business from a brilliant idea, theyve added all of this functionality -

Jun 2013 Better Collaboration Jul 2012 Screen Blackout

May 2013 Simpler Sharing Jul 2012 3D Backgrounds

Feb 2013 Simpler Top Menu Jul 2012 Fade-in Animations

Jan 2013 Sound Jun 2012 Grouping Content

Dec 2012 Templification May 2012 Powerpoint Import

Dec 2012 The Transformation Tool

Apr 2012 Spellcheck

Dec 2012 Object Library Apr 2012 Path Sidebar

Nov 2012 Prezi for iPhone Apr 2012 Plus (+) Button

Oct 2012 Presenter View Apr 2012 Aspect Ratio Guide



Jan 2012 Text Drag Apart & Autopanning

Jun 2011 Advanced Right-Click Menu

Nov 2011 Prezi Profile Pages May 2011 Bendable Lines

Nov 2011 Better Colors and Fonts, Editing

May 2011 Image Cropping

Sep 2011 Play Button Feb 2011 Image Smoothing

Sep 2011 Templates Dec 2010 Color Wizard

Aug 2011 Inserting Shapes Dec 2010 CSS Editor

Jul 2011 Insert a Drawing Dec 2010 Drag and Drop

Jun 2011 Grouping with Frames Nov 2010 Snap, Right-click Menu, Copy-Paste Text

Jun 2011 Google Image Insert Sep 2010 Zoom to Lock

Jun 2011 New Zebra Aug 2010 Prezi Meeting

At a crossing in the road

Today, Prezi is better, stronger, more user-friendly than we could ever have imagined that it could have been. But where are we really?

Hundreds of thousands of young, intelligent, enthusiastic people (your typical early adopters), all over the world, are using Prezi. There are literally millions of Prezis out there for people to see and use. And most of them are rubbish. They arent visual aids: theyre tools for supervised reading. Little different to the vast majority of PowerPoint slides that weve all panned for years.

That rapid proliferation has been part of the problem. We were all trying to find a way to use the tool, I made mistakes with it; we all did. But in the innovation and adoption stage, thats what happens. Prezi still might fail to take hold, and with all of that inexpert experimentation we were helping to brand an innocent piece of software as a geeks presentation trick, and you only have to take a look at Prezis website to see that many of the highly recommended Prezis, the ones with lots of views and hundreds of likes often look good at a glance, but fail when looked at more closely. The same is true, even for the staff picks. Prezis site is clogged up with lots of sincerely meant, fundamentally flawed examples of what Prezi can do.

The idea of Prezi is still alive, and clinging on with a chance of reaching the mainstream.

where Does Prezi sTanD ToDay?

The gooD news


The Second Wave - convincing the early majority

In Europe, at least, were entering the second wave for Prezi. Opinion Leaders have adopted it and/or rejected it vociferously. Weve seen it used at conferences, at TED and in business presentations, and some senior people in some pretty big corporations are starting to demand it in their lives.

If Prezi is going to be around in 5 years, we have to make sure that we use it, show it and talk about it in a way that makes sense to the (rightly) sceptical next generation of users who will try it once, and discard it if it doesnt do what it promised. What are the challenges that must be faced if were to make a success of this product? To convince the early majority of business users, 2 things have to happen:

1. We have to move away from describing Prezi as a presenting tool and understand that we can use it much more broadly in business, because it may just be that Prezis success will lie in the fact that it has many potential uses, not just one use as a rather limited presenting package.

2. We have to make sure that we use Prezi to its best advantage, for its few real strengths, and minimise its many potential weaknesses, or the impatient, change-averse corporate crowd will reject Prezi out of hand, and Prezi will probably fail to recover.

That is what the rest of this eBook is about.


Establishing the wider case for Prezi

Prezi is a good tool for presenting, but it may have even better, unimagined uses for many businesses - though the principles of creating a good Prezi presentation remains the same. Have you thought about using Prezi in the following ways?

1. A self-running presentation on a stand-alone monitor as a part of your next conference stand or marketing event.

2. A touch-screen presentation for customers to learn about your products and services in your public areas at your business premises.

3. An easy way to create and share online learning modules hosted on your intranet as a part of your knowledge-sharing offering for employees and clients.

4. Embedded content on your website for your users to see your ideas, products and services in more detail. With or without narration.

5. A remote meeting and brainstorming tool to bring teams together all over the world and build ideas collaboratively.

6. A tablet/iPad tool for sit-down discussions in business, where Prezis off-path ability would allow you to use it as a discussion aid.



Heres a really interesting Prezi from Jacco van der Kooij that shares his ideas, and expands on mine, on how you can use Prezi more widely in your business life:


So if you want to make the most of your hard-won experience in using this, potentially, brilliant tool, you have to be better than the Prezi norm. You have to bring a structured, rational and business-like approach to your design of Prezis and use of the tool.

In the next pages, well look at the fundamentals of creating and using Prezi in the best, most professional way, to help you stand out from your competitive crowd. For each element well show you best and worst practice examples from the ever-expanding Prezi world.

The opinions expressed here are all ours. You dont have to agree with our opinions, but we believe that an opinion helps others to form theirs, and so it is with this in mind that well cover the following:

1. Using the big picture possibilities of Prezi to make a great impression.

2. Remove sickness from the Prezi vocabulary by reducing spinning, zooming and panning.

3. Understand visual structure and layout - stacking and layering.

4. Use templates to help you hit the ground running.

Use Prezi with skill


The thing I love most about Prezi is the big, blank canvas: a place where you can create simple, visual aids to help you tell your story. The problem with a big, blank canvas is hinted at in the name. Its big and its blank. So theres a great challenge for non-designers. Two questions they need answering are:

What do I fill it with? A big picture that frames or outlines your subject and acts as a reinforcer of your presentations big idea. See our Six presentation structures download for examples.

How do I use it? As an emphatic tool to help you see the big picture and how it all fits together, and then to zoom in and pan for detail, before zooming out again to allow the audience to see how it all fits together.

Use Prezis big picture possibilities to make a great first impression


Remove sickness from the Prezi vocabulary by reducing spinning, zooming and panning

There are a few things to understand about using Prezis tricks well. Essentially Prezi only allows you to do 3 things with content:

1. Use Layering to create interesting unveiling effects.

2. Zoom in and out for emphasis and expansion of an idea.

3. Make things appear to help build an argument, progression or an idea.

In order to get the best from the tool when presenting we need to be careful when were putting things onto the canvas. There are 3 concepts that we need to understand in order to do a great job. We need to pay attention to:



The amount of spinning and zooming in your Prezi depends on how you arrange and align your path elements on the canvas, because Prezi looks at your path and decides for itself, the best way to move (transition) from path-point to path-point.

So if your next path-point is a long way from the previous one, Prezi has to zoom quickly and directly between the 2 points, which can mean a very distracting and disorienting journey for the viewer. Pay attention to the following three issues when arranging assets on your canvas and joining them with the path tool. Be aware of:

Proximity - The closer things are to the previous path point, the smoother the transition will be.

Rotation - Be aware of greater than 60 degree rotations from path-point to path-point and use 180-360 rotations very carefully, for deliberate reasons; for example, to zoom out to your big picture in order to move to the next act or major part of your story.

Scale and zoom - Zooming in deeply and zooming out strongly can be very effective ways of emphasising a key point (zooming in), and giving context, but dont combine a big zoom with a long, lateral transition, or a greater than 60 degree rotation, or the audience will be at best confused, or at worst, sick.

Heres a really good example of how to use Prezis panning and zooming to best effect - from Prezis excellent collection of how-to videos, available free from Prezi.com.

working wiTh ProximiTy, roTaTion anD zooming


One of the next hardest things to do as we build real, high-end Prezi skills, is to understand how we can best arrange all of our assets on the canvas and then build the path through our Prezi to make the most of the strengths (layering, zooming, the large canvas etc.) and minimise the weaknesses (excessive zooming, spinning and lateral motion). There are a few simple rules that we can follow as a start and these include:

1. Understanding basic framing and layout principles.

2. Remembering to zoom in and out vertically before panning across.

3. Using the screen ratio tool to make sure that what you see in a frame is what you see on the screen when presenting.

4. Using simple layout grid thinking for every frame you show, so that theres a professional and coherent visual structure to every path point view in your presentation.

5. Linking your visual structure to your story structure and have chunks of your Prezi for each part - Prologue, Act 1, Act 2, Act 3, Epilogue - and consider the layering of the chunks to allow you to develop an In-Out or an Out-In structure to help you tell that story.

Understand visual structure and layout



Heres that same Prezi (A Prezi Team) again. It shows how you can use simple visual structure to help you tell your story. Notice how we use the chunks of the story as stages of our Prezi path.

Starting off with the Prologue chunk zoomed in to grab the audiences attention;

Then zooming out to tell the main 3 acts of the story ;

and moving between the 3 acts with short, lateral transitions, after showing the audience the big picture to make sure they see the point.

Then Zooming out for the last time to emphasise the real value of Prezi (and our services) which is to help the viewer stand out every time they stand up to speak.



This stacking and layering of content chunks is one of Prezis most important, and little known strengths. Most important because it allows you to move away from the linear nature of PowerPoint when using Prezi. Little known, only because Prezi has been around for such a short time, and were still creating the rules, arent we?

In our publication 6 Speech Structures we show you how to use classic story structure to write your speech. In short there should be the 3 Acts that audiences expect in any well written story: three acts, and an attention grabbing first 30 seconds, then a confident, concise closing 30 seconds, represented graphically as follows:

If you follow a similar structure in creating your presentations, youll find that you have 5 chunks of content that you can create as 5 distinct parts of your Prezi visuals. Each chunk will have a path of its own (though, obviously, the path is continuous). To make the most of Prezis abilities, you can then arrange your content using scaling, layering and animation, to help you tell the story in a visually interesting way, while avoiding excessive zooming, panning and lateral transitions.

NB. In each of the examples below, the Red element is where you would start the presentation; Blue is the 3-act story structure; and Green is the rousing end of the presentation.

An in-out-out approach:

Start zoomed in for the prologue;Zoom out for the 3 acts of the story;Zoom out again showing the whole story in the context of what you want them to do.

An out-in-out approach:

Start zoomed half-way in for the prologue;Zoom in for the 3 acts of the story;Zoom out all the way for the epilogue, showing the whole story in the context of what you want them to do.

in-ouT or ouT-in sTacking sTraTegy

heres how:



An out-out-in approach:

Start zoomed out for the prologue;Zoom out again for the 3 acts of the story;Zoom in all the way for the hard-hitting epilogue.

sTeP-by-sTeP To sTacking anD layering


Use templates to help you hit the ground running

Many of the challenges we face can be solved by developing your own, trusted templates with the right fonts, colours, frames, layouts and paths already made, so all you need to do is fill the empty spaces with your content and edit the formatting, alignment and sizing before you present.

You can use Prezis bank of templates andtweak them with different fonts, colour schemes, backgrounds and lines, and then save them as your own template for use again and again.

This is probably a good place for you to start if you dont have the budget to go further. But the Prezi templates dont really use stacking and layering as weve discussed here. They go for the easy method of an eye-catching background and a linear progression. Pretty basic, but pretty good too.

Prezi has made a lot of movement in the right direction over the last 2 years, adding tens of new templates to the choices on offer to the new user. Theyve even used some of our thinking on 6 Presentation Structures. Download our free document here.



But Prezis templates are still:

Visually clichd already and well on the way to becoming like Microsoft clipart in the 1990s.

More arty than practical for serious business users.

Reliant on circular frames - which is simply mad because it wastes 50% of the screen on a 16x6 or 4x3 monitor when presented.

And theyll become even more clichd as this year progresses and Prezi moves towards 20 million users.

1. Theyll help you stand out - theyll be uniquely suited to you, your organisation and your brand. They wont be the ones that everyone is using.

2. Theyll save you time - because all of the time-consuming background work, like creating layouts, paths, transitions, and scaling and zooming, will be done for you. All you have to do is add your content to the empty frames.

3. Theyll save you money - because if youre a professional, your hourly rate is probably well above $100 an hour. Itll take you at least 3 hours to do all of that thinking and planning to layout your Prezi. And if a template costs you $15.00

Our job is to help you make the most of your next presentation opportunity. To help you stand out from the crowd, for all the right reasons. Prezi is outstanding, if used well. If you want to learn to be the best in the business here are 3 things you could do right now to help:

1. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter - FREE. Click here.

2. Download the Prezi for Professionals eBook - FREE. Click here.

3. Download our Prezi templates - FREE. Click here.

3 reasons why you shoulD buy or make your own Prezi TemPlaTes

geT sTarTeD on shaPing The seconD wave of Prezi


NOTICE OF RIGHTS All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

NOTICE OF LIABILITYThe author and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information herein. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied.Neither the authors and Allcow Communications, nor its dealers or distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused either directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book, or by the software or hardware products described herein.Copyright 2013 Jim Harvey

First EditionPublication Date: October 2013First published:October 2013Published by: Jim Harvey Producer: Jim HarveyWriters: Jim HarveyGraphic Design: Rosie Hoyland

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, CALL OR EMAIL:

+44 (0)1832 272773 (UK)[email protected]

JIMS BLOGwww.jim-harvey.com


The honeymoon is overThe Second Wave - convincing the early majorityEstablishing the wider case for PreziUse Prezi with skillUse Prezis big picture possibilities to make a great first impressionRemove sickness from the Prezi vocabulary by reducing spinning, zooming and panningUnderstand visual structure and layoutUse templates to help you hit the ground running

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