The aesthetics of words

Garr has written a lot about presentation design and fonts in his wonderful blog and also recommended Robin Williams’ The Non-Designer’s Design Book from which you can learn a lot about design in general and, indirectly, about presentation design. Today I made a “wordle” of “Es spricht!”. Although randomly (?) designed by an algorithm the outcome is very beautiful – and a great mixture of languages.

Copyright wordle.net

Here you can see that using one font in related colours can produce coherence and form inspite of being random.

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Sesame Street & the Manamana of a good presentation!

What do a Sesame Street song-classic, a good presentation and impro theatre have in common? (deutsche Fassung)

They’re fun and they only work if you feel like doing it, if you’re completely present and if they’re based on interaction. “We could sing a good song if we have one more person to sing!” – if you replace “song” and “singing” by “presentation” and “presenting” then you can learn how to do a good presentation by watching the singer (is he meant to a Joe Cocker twin?) in the following Sesame Street classic:

[youtube=http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=hTkGXuiT55w#]

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As question, so the answer.

Summary of yesterday’s entry “König Kunde!” in English. German visitors to the blog please read the German version of 22 August.

“King Customer” or “The Customer is King” is a German idiom for ‘The Customer is always right’. To summarize the blog entry in a simple sentence: As question, so the answer. In a normal selling situation a good salesman will put positive opening questions to his customer in order to attract sympathy and trust from him. I claim that it’s a creative and instructive game to reverse roles, i.e. to lead a perfect sales conversation as a customer. This means, you choose to be a benign sovereign instead of acting the tyrant or absolutist customer/king: You’re the one seeking sympathy and trust from your subjects. To reign does mean to lead and direct people and – in this case – to lead and direct a successful conversation. The right questions are essential for this success.

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