How to create a good prezi - for Wired magazine

Wired commissioned HMDG  to create their Intelligence Briefing using Prezi, about ten trends worth discussing. Being regular readers of Wired it is no surprise that the result is full of interesting data, includes a massive load of information. To continue our series of Q&A about how to create a good presentation, we have asked Jamie to explain his experience with Prezi this time.

How do you see the future of story telling?

People are consuming media in so many different ways. Without a strong narrative, your message will get lost, whether you are a brand trying to reach a customer or  an individual trying to connect with an audience. But there are also all sorts of new ways to tell a story, of which Prezi is one.

What were the most attractive features of Prezi when you first tried it?

It’s both simple and theatrical at the same time. There’s a wow factor that really helps win your audience’s attention. At HMDG, we’re using it in a lot of our new business meetings and it makes a real difference when your potential clients have sat through a day of Powerpoint. Actually, I was just a bit anxious to be able to use Prezi a few times before too many people found out about it.

Was it easy or hard to switch?

Hard, hard, hard. It doesn’t take long to learn how to use Prezi itself. But I think I’m still getting my head round how to make it work best as a format. There’s a dependency between all the elements of the presentation that you don’t have when you’re working with charts.  So you do have to work at it to make sure your thinking is clear.

Your prezi is really well constructed looking at the big picture and in the smallest details as well. What was the main message you wanted to visualize with it?

I was scratching my head for a bigger theme until I realised this particular presentation was a list when it came down to it. So I wanted a visual that intrigued the audience from a distance and acted as a bridge to these robust individual bits of content.

What was your method of building relations and arguments?

I think you need to answer two questions to make a good prezi. Firstly, what does it look like from a distance? If you can start with that image it helps a lot. It gives you a structure.  Secondly, you need to have work out how the ‘pods’ - the individual sections of the presentation – work. I was creating this for a live presentation, so each one had to be really hit and run – a big thought, a key example, a single powerful statistic. I’ve found Q&As like this quite useful. I read the blogpost on Loqloq and saw how something messy like sketches can work really well when you mix it with the slickness of a Prezi. That made me think handwritten headlines might look ok.

Having said all that, there’s something to be said for just getting your content up on the screen and messing about with it. I try not to worry about adding the paths until I’m nearing the end.

How much time did it take to finish the project?

Maybe a day or two for the actual Prezi. But this particular project took place over several months.

How do you think Prezi helps the audience understand your points?

It’s much less familiar, so I think they concentrate more. And it’s inherently playful, which is useful if you want to reach people.

Server maintenance this Sunday

We’ll have to unplug Prezi.com this Sunday morning from 10-13 AM CET (08:00-11:00 UTC), due to software upgrades. The goal of the server upgrade is to remove a certain component from the infrastructure that might - in some cases - can cause malfunction.

During the process, our online services will be unavailable. This means:

1. You won’t be able to reach Prezi.com, the online editor,


2. You can’t login or reach your online Prezis from PreziDesktop (offline editor available for Pro users).


3. You can still edit, and export presentations with PreziDesktop in offline mode (since the software is not necessarily connected to the internet).


4. Of course you can even show your Prezis during downtime, if you have previously downloaded them to your desktop.

We will try to make this process as painless as possible. Our most effective weapon to achieve this goal is transparency and support.

For this reason, you can comment to this post or ask any questions at Prezisupport on Twitter while our data center is offline. Once the upgrade has finished, we will notify you immediately on the blog and on Twitter as well.

My page upgrade now live: send a prezi in password protected email, embed and collaborate!

In the past weeks they were under an experimental URL (thanks for your great feedback), today we finally deploy the following new features live:

1. Send a prezi to a client or colleague via email – with password protection (Pro and Enjoy customers)
2. Embed with a code generator on the new My page
3. Invite collaborators, simply by adding their email, even if they don’t have a prezi account yet.

All these features are available from the redesigned My page that is now live. As we have mentioned before, the structure of the page has changed as we added the new features. You will see it immediately when you login on Prezi.com.

Start using them now, and don't forget to have your say in the comment area!

Prezi at TEDGlobal: video of Parag Khanna mapping the future of countries

We couldn't be happier: the first talk visualized with Prezi at TEDGlobal conference back in July just appeared on TED.com. As we have posted about this before, New America Foundation researcher and geopolitics expert Parag Khanna spoke at the annual conference in Oxford, UK and he used Prezi to visualize his very interesting topic about countries reshaping constantly. TED also invested in Prezi since.

Please note that the Prezi you can see in the video above has been created by professional designers and include pre-made flash animations. Adding them to a Prezi is not a feature of our software now.

Yesterday, Parag took time to kindly join a short Q&A session about his experiences using Prezi back in Oxford.

Prezi: Thanks for choosing Prezi for your talk at TEDGlobal! What were your considerations when you have decided to switch?

Parag Khanna: Two of the flaws in cartographic depictions is that people toggle between maps which almost gives the impression that different regions aren't connected, but I wanted to be able to flow between them so that the world appears an organic whole. Another is that border shifts are often depicted in sudden, jerky shifts, whereas in reality the "facts on the ground" can change and mutate slowly. Prezi allows to do both these things better.


For you, what is the main difference between Prezi and other presentation tools?

Prezi is very intuitive to use. It seems to allow one to implement one's thoughts rather than having to adapt to clunky software.

How did Prezi help you explaining your topic?

I wanted to show the slow, morphing of borders and new vectors of influence like finance and demographics and infrastructure. Prezi allowed me to overlay this onto existing political borders.

How did it feel to speak with Prezi as a visual aid in the background?

It was very easy - and in fact having Prezi there was a really great substitute for having a prepared text since it visualized for me and the audience exactly what I wanted to say!

How do you think Prezi affects the audience's understanding?

Prezi really helped people understand the range of influences at play in affecting borders, which are such a traditional and basic issue that it's almost forgotten today.

With Prezi, code is sexy - interview with Facebook engineer Brian Shire

There was quite a buzz on Twitter about a prezi a few weeks ago, that was created by Brian Shire, and presented in Tokyo at this year's annual PHP Conference. Shire, who works as an engineer at Facebook in California, says he really likes to create relations and deep analysis in Prezi. In his approach Prezi is a great tool if you want to show a massive amount of data and show an eye popping presentation in one.

Continuing our interview series, we present a short Q&A below with Brian, who kindly took time to answer our questions and explain his professional view on how to create a good prezi.

Brian, first a little bit about you: what is your job at Facebook, and how have you decided to use Prezi for your international speeches?


I started at Facebook writing front-end products such as Notes and Discussion Boards, but for the last 3-4 years I've focused on performance in PHP Internals and APC (an opcode cache for PHP) specifically.  The next logical step was to start giving talks at conferences about APC, which I was initially doing in Keynote.  Around the same time I was able to attend a lecture by Edward R. Tufte, his description of modern presentations as an "Endless parade of slides" was very applicable and when I spent a year or two searching for alternatives that could bring more rich interactive displays especially for technical material.  But this meant writing up a presentation in something like Flash or Java, which wasn't really appealing or realistic.  When I came across Prezi I knew this was a much improved format for what I needed.  Scalable data presented in an interactive way yet still easy to create and manipulate for the presenter.  I re-wrote my existing presentation for APC in prezi, and never thought of going back after.

Have you found easy or hard to swicth to a slideless presentation tool?

At first I found the switch difficult, but more in the sense of wanting to be more creative and thoughtful about how things where presented.  I still want to improve on this, it's far from perfect, but that's what makes Prezi better.  With other tools, improvements are often made by say changing color, adding charts, or other eye candy (what Tufte would call Crud).  These aren't actually changing how you present data, they are really just obscuring it.  With Prezi I'm thinking more about how obvious it is to the audience, if it flows well, if it's interesting and appealing not my slide templates or chart junk (although I still toss in a few images every now and then for fun, sorry Tufte).

What are the most interesting potentials of Prezi for you?

I'm really excited about every presentation being expected to meet a higher standard.  Currently if you're presenting to many hundreds of people, have time, and a large budget you can create an amazing presentation.  But I think Prezi makes this level attainable for everyone presenting information.  I want to see every talk, no matter how large or small, present data in an interesting and meaningful way.  I want also want people to present more data than what you can with traditional slide show presentations, I think the ratio of actual data presented in today's talks is pretty low.  Presenters often have to sacrifice interest factor for data.  We should actually get more interesting with more data not the other way around.  I also hope to see users start to push the creativity level in their presentations and come up with things that we haven't necessarily thought of doing before, Prezi makes and I think will continue to make this possible for users.

About the prezi you made for the PHP Conerence: what was your main message
you wanted to visualize with it?

 I wanted to create a feeling of components nested in a larger system.  Being a topic that is very technical, even for a technical presentation, I wanted to make sure we could break items down into very concrete elements so that they where in an ideal form for learning.  I also wanted to give it a free-flowing and "active" feel.  There's always some portions of any talk that are probably more appealing than others, especially in a technical discussion.  Part of my job is to make sure we get through the "boring" parts to things that the audience can actually take with them back with them to get something beneficial done.   Prezi suits these goals well, but now I know the pressure is on me to try to be more creative rather than just fitting data to a pre-built template.

When you worked on the prezi: what was your method to build relations and
arguments?

One is to use the frames and arrows (or whatever other items you wanted, these could also be scalable graphics etc).  I then combine these in a way that I would if I was creating a flow graph, but with Prezi I can walk through and zoom into each of these levels.  Even if you can't see all the details early on you can still see a high level view of everything, where we are going, and even show it all again after it's been explained.

Another method I used was to keep context by zooming way into some object and displaying a much more detailed explanation.  For example having a really high level statement, and then zoom into the white-space between the text and provide a detailed flow so that we didn't loose context for the audience.  This is something normal presentations can't do, or have to do in such a boring way they loose half the audience, by zooming in we keep context and can actually keep someone's attention.

These are both particularly useful for code examples where code can be difficult to read, or can really create a loss of interest.

The zooming can really key into what's relevant and not be an eye sore.

How much time did it take to finish the project?

Like everything, a lot of this is a progression, and I try to update my presentations for every conference.  I would estimate that I probably spent a week or two playing with different things, but in the end actual time spent was probably only like a day to create a presentation like this.  I created my recent presentation for Rakuten in about 4 hours.

What was the feedback from your audience? How do you think Prezi
helped explaining such a complex topic to the audience?

The feedback has been great, and is one of the primary reasons I continue to use Prezi (after all if it's not working for the audience there's no point).  Someone always asks about the presentation tool I used for this, and I think often times they are surprised when I give them a URL to go to to create one of their own online.  I think they where expecting something more heavy weight or inaccessible.  The organization allows for good context and association, but it also keeps the slides interesting.  It helps the audience feel more like they are actually getting a presentation, rather than just being read to.