Work­ing on a pre­sen­ta­tion, the most time-consuming activ­ity for me is find­ing great pic­tures to illus­trate con­cepts, emo­tions or what­ever I’m try­ing to con­vey. Though their use is not that wide-spread yet, espe­cially in the cor­po­rate world, they are very effec­tive as tools to com­mu­ni­cate, mostly because of the over­weight the brain is putting on visual perception.

As a sim­ple exam­ple, when I want to illus­trate the need to seek diver­sity in order to cre­ate inno­va­tion, I’m usu­ally putting an image such as the fol­low­ing when talk­ing. It makes diver­sity much more con­crete and rememberable.

With so many peo­ple spend­ing time to find the best pics, the idea is sim­ple: share them. I have started to tweet the one I’m find­ing with the link, the tags I would put for them, and the hash­tag #prezpic. So please, try to do the same when research­ing pic­tures for pre­sen­ta­tions, it will take you an added 10 secs per pic­ture, and could make a huge dif­fer­ence in the qual­ity of illus­tra­tions. I’ve started by shar­ing some of mine, do a twit­ter search on #prezpic to see them.

And if you won­der why putting images in your pre­sen­ta­tions is so effec­tive, then start by read­ing these 3 blogs and fol­low­ing their advice :)

• Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen
• Slides that Stick
• Nancy Duarte’s blog

PS: If this gains trac­tion, the best way to col­lect links will prob­a­bly be to sub­scribe to the RSS feed for the search :)

Photo credit: Flick user ober­azzi