Hi, my name is Julian; this week’s blog is on…

Presentations. On Wednesday morning, we were given a lecture on the correct presentation techniques. I already knew that a conversational presentation style worked best for me, as I have done presentation in English and Business studies in the past. This presentation, however, would have to be a lot more professional than that. At this stage, I was feeing confident that I would be able to produce a presentation, but on what, and to whom I would not find out until later.

We were each given a colour to research, and had a partner to work with. I was given the colour blue, and had to work with Chris Towell. I felt comfortable working with Chris, as I was in his feedback group in the first assignment. I believe that this allowed us to criticise each others work without fear or a negative reaction. This certainly made the process easier, and we collected enough information to give us some food for thought.

Despite blue being one of the primary colours, and one of the most popular as our research showed, there wasn’t a massive amount that could create a relevant presentation. I thought that some of the information was hard to fit into a web design context, but managed to draw out issues such as the symbolism of blue, and what connotations it creates. In my presentation, I made these the key areas which I would talk about, as I thought that the audience would find this most relevant.

Apart from creating our presentation, we also had to make a hand out sheet that was to be distributed at the end of the presentation. I believed that a very simple design covering the key parts of the presentation plus additional reading was the best way to go about this. My sheet was simple, but neatly laid out. However, I think that if I did this again, I would have been more ambitions with my design. We are, after all in a creative, communication industry.

After a quick lunch, Chris and I returned to the room. This gave us ample time to read through each other’s slides and handout sheet. This is something that I have started to do more often with classmates, as other people can pick up on discrepancies you may have missed yourself. Chris found that some of the font sizes on my slides were inconsistent, and these were swiftly put right.

At this point, I was feeling confident that I had everything ready. Although I had found the research quite tough to do, I had enough information on my slides and my handout sheet to give a good presentation.

At one o’clock the whole class went down to the refectory to wait to be called up to the room. I tried my best to rehearse my presentation in my head, and thought that I would easily fill up the time with my slides. Once people started going up to do their presentations and returning, the tension started to rise. It was an awful feeling to see people coming back from the classroom with clear signs of relief on their faces as they had got the presentation out of the way.
Word quickly got round that the only people we were presenting to were Steve and Diane. I felt that this was actually tougher then it would have been if we were told we had to present to the class. I don’t really know why this is, possibly because it felt more like a formal assessment rather than a lecture style presentation.

Chris was the first of the two of us to be called up to do his presentation. I feel that this put more pressure on me because I felt mine had to at least match the quality of his. I was the next one to be sent up to the room. This is when the tension really started to mount. Every step that I got closer to the room, the nervousness increased ten fold.

I could not understand why I was so worried, I thought to myself “this really shouldn’t be worrying me, but it is”. In the past, I have been quite relaxed when doing presentations, as I was in the company of people I had known for years. This was very different.

I entered the room, and said as little as possible, trying to keep the professional feel as high as I could. I do now think maybe if I had been a little more conversational it would have helped me to relax.

Thankfully, my file was still on my data stick, and hadn’t vaporised. I began my presentation and the time flew by. During it, I felt my voice warbling, which is always embarrassing and a confidence destroyer. I also started to stumble over my own words, which I hadn’t experienced before. This clearly marked this presentation as a cut above the rest, even though nothing really important was resting on the outcome.

At the end of the presentation, I was given feedback from Steve and Diane. To my amazement, I had overrun by a whole minute, but Steve had not stopped me because he said he was enjoying my presentation so much. This surprised me, as I thought the stuff I had researched was not of the highest quality. I was also waving my arms around too much, like some kind of traffic warden. This is obviously something I will have to stop doing in the future.

Overall the feedback was good. I do feel in some ways that I needed to control my anxiety more, which would have improved the rapport I could have created with the audience. I also need to learn to understand how time seems to become a lot shorter when you are doing a presentation and I should rehearse it more before I stand up and start presenting.

This was the first piece of presentation I had done since my initial interview with Steve. I felt that because I was in control of the subject matter at the interview, I could attenuate my knowledge because I felt almost an authority on it. With my presentation, however, I was given something which I had to research and present on, and this lack of control made if harder for me to have confidence in what I was saying.

I believe in the future I should learn the ad-lib parts better from the research I gather. This will allow my presentation to be more concrete. I know in myself that I like to go into detail about how things are done, as I like to give people reassurance that they are doing or feeling or thinking the right things. These are certainly considerations I will make for the next presentation.