Exercises: Representation Presentations

The exercise for this chapter involves making a slide show about representation in the contemporary media landscape. Before we look at the task, there are some compositional principles of good slide shows to explore. These principles build on the compositional principles we’ve used in an analytical way so far on paintings and films. This is a moment to begin practicing using those visual skills to create something of your own.

Compositional Principles of Slide Creation

Read the following section to help you design a strong, professional-grade slideshow – a key skill across a wide range of careers, workplaces, and environments.

Study the principles. On the slide show you create, you will be asked to name and explain how you are using a different one of these compositional tools for each of your slides.

Identify – Your viewer needs to be able to find the main point quickly. You can identify the main point using size, shape, emphasis (underline, italics, emboldening), color and brightness, distance, or combinations of two or more. Think of it as a focal point. Making these aspects different to other information on your slide guides your reader’s eye to what’s important first.

Guide – As a painting does, your slide must control the movement of your viewer’s eye towards the focal point and around the slide. Thankfully with a slide, we don’t have to be as subtle. You can use arrows, numbers, bullets, diminishing size, and other visual tactics to guide your viewer around the slide and through the major pieces of information. If you use images of people or animals, make sure they’re looking towards the focal point.

Order – If you’re choosing to put more than one point or piece of information on a slide, it’s important to establish a hierarchical relationship between the information using visual cues. Font size and indentation give us a clear sense of how information relates on a slide. Try to avoid more than three or four pieces of information on a slide, as it becomes exponentially more difficult for a reader to take in at a glance.

Arrange – The way the objects on your slide are arranged is a form of information for your reader. Their balance or unbalanced arrangement should reflect the content of the slide: are you discussing order or chaos? Algebraic precision or real-world process? The compositional principle of balance can convey this information in the visual layout of your slide alongside any words you use.

Map – Imagine a grid over your slide. Is it arranged in three, four, or five columns? Some objects might occupy multiple squares, and some sections of the slide might be empty. An imaginary grid allows you to measure the amount of space being used on your slide for different aspects, and whether you’re overloading the slide.

Negative Space – Blank or negative space is an important part of any slideshow. It will be present on almost every single slide in a good slide show, to differing degrees. The one or two slides that don’t have it should stand out – not be yet another in a relentless series of overloaded slides. Negative space allows the focal point of your slide to take precedence and allows it to convey its message to your viewers most powerfully.

Exercise: RePresentations

Prepare a 5 slide presentation on a film of your choice discussing how it relates to issues of representation.

Your presentation can focus on race, gender, class, nationality, sexuality, age, body-type or an intersection of two or more.

As you create your slides, consider the principles of composition for each slide. On each slide, write at the bottom of the slide one of the principles that you’ve used in your slide design and give a brief explanation on how it applies to your slide, for example “Negative space – I left the top right of the slide empty to focus the viewer’s attention on the important text on the bottom left”. Use a different principle for each slide.