What did Prezi founders learn from MTV videos, or the zooming bullet perspective of television series like CSI Miami? Why are Steve Jobs or Larry Lessig so successful presenters? A year ago today founders of Prezi, Peter and Adam, asked the audience these questions at a workshop in Budapest, which was a double celebration, and launch party in one.
It was the first birthday of Kitchen Budapest, the media lab where Prezi was forged, and the best opportunity to launch beta testing of the application then called “ZuiPrezi” after years of development and experimenting.
When asked about inspiration, Peter always says that it’s like different market models for business people. “Artists have to roll an inspiration list, as businessmen cite different models they follow” – he laughs. Still, the main topic of the workshop last July was inspiration. Things that inspired Peter and Adam to create a presentation and storytelling tool for our zooming, nonlinear visual age. They talked about fractal geometry which became quite popular in the ’90s, as our perspective began to accept the complexity of fractals. They talked about data visualization in video clips like the famous one from Royksopp:
He and Adam realized that slideshows, and the pre-computer approach of visualization is outdated by our new way of visual thinking. Even the most commercial TV shows like CSI Miami now use a special perspective. These crime stories are built by setting up a map based on a body, a room, analyzing a small object left at the scene. Steve Jobs’ or Larry Lessig’s presentations became so popular because they use ordinary presentation tools in a new way (title of Garr Reynold’s famous book, Presentation Zen could be “How to Present Like Steve Jobs Manual”)
All these things were and are inspiration for Prezi developers, who have created the right visualization tool for today’s presenters. A tool that inspires thinking instead of drawing borders to the workflow. And a year ago today, some members of the audience at the workshop in Budapest, took the first beta licenses and started to play with Prezi themselves.
i hadn’t considered some of the various influences on Prezi. Very neat to see how all of this evolved.