Thoughts on my presentation

I've also created my presentation and have practiced it a couple of times getting comfortable with all the slides as well up to this point. A few revisions to bridge the gap between points has been suggested and revised. This is good as the final presentation will be more put together and coherent then if I had given the presentation right off the bat.

There is a lot of information to sum up in a 15 minute span when the project has taken 4 months to complete and seems almost unfair that all this work is compressed into this tight time frame. I know how movie people probably feel now. Working on something for a year with a multimillion dollar budget and having it last 2 hours.. Oh well at least they get to have their projects immortalized on video or dvd available at christmas and at your local rental shop.

I've also scoped out the room on the advice of Tak which was good because I would not have thought stand in the place I did if I had not done this.

Also the damn remote that was installed has the range of a gnat's ass. Thank god I found this out or I wouldn't have been able to address the audience at the same time as giving my presentation. I want to be INFRONT of my audience not behind them giving them the spiel. A valuable lesson. All this stuff is adding up and hopefully I get to practice one or two more times before my presentation on Wednesday morning. 

I've also been watching a lot of presentation zen and ted.com. These website get me amped to present because the subjects that the speakers talk about are things they are experts at and are truly passionate that makes a difference in this world.  Just like charity giving and receiving information creates to improve our lives though knowledge and for this I'm thankful that I have received so much through this class in terms of exposure to things that I didn't know before. I hope I never get so stale and inflexible as to stop learning and think that I know everything there is to know already.

thoughts up to this point

So after a meeting with my mentor Scot a couple of things were pointed out to me.

If the logo was on the lower right hand corner it's the first thing to disappear when someone resizes a window.

The photo credit at the bottom of the polaroid needed to be moved to maintain the humanist feel of the photo.

The panel 'related stories' panel on the side needed to be redone to accommodate the shift in menu from the bottom right where the logo used to be to the top right and the options moved to the top of the left panel which is perfect because most navigation is seen on the left side and might be more intuitive and better seen on that end.

After consulting a few people on the state of the site my friend reminded me that this is not all about death and gloom though that's what people imagine when funding a cause it can also be hopeful causes as well and thus I went back in my file and started to review some of the causes I had come across in my search I came across and project proposal that was carried through by International Center for Sustainable Cities and a few photos I requested. This gave me the content I needed to put the next couple of pages up so it could demonstrate the possibility of networking donors and causes on a smaller scale. The photos were also good because it made some of the organizations more creditable and I understand that if this is a public domain and there's going to be some bad apples that put up faulty or fraudulant stories to get people to donate and scam money but something a rigorous filtering process might be able to minimize like on the 'give meaning' website. This is not within the scope of the project though it will be revisited if the project goes gets support and goes ahead after this the presentations have been given.

The live updates page was also added to show how someone could keep coming back to something like this. It also creates habit.  

The discussions page was also added so that the community can also interact on the site as well. An idea I just had is maybe to put the dialogue as a live update on the main page when filtering through but this might be too much information and excessive rather than necessary. 

Gill Sans regular is also substituted in with the Light version because the regular made it feel a little heavy. Agenda and Bliss were tested as well but did not work as well as the humanist Gill Sans typeface. 

A share button option was also added because of the nature of the stories and photos I think buzz marketing is probably best for a website like this because creditability towards listening to what friends want you to see and what a flyer has to convey does not have the same persuasiveness. Something like a facebook application that could send you stories and photos daily or weekly may increase the exposure of the site as well because people are always uploading the content will never be the same. The more people see these stories the more support they will get. Ultimately this will be a database and hub for people's stories and the beauty of charity and making our world a little easier to live in for everyone.

Transparent menu panels added and starting refinement of positioning of panels and started to consider the links to different pages and more emphasis on user interface.

Big Overhaul of site. Tossed the cardboard but retained the colour of the map and type which was sampled from the cardboard to give the gritty humanist feel to the site. 

Initial vision of the contact sheet. Counter was still made as separate page as part of the splash intro.