The prezi above has been created by Jamie Inman, strategic planner at Wired UK’s creative agency – HMDG. Wired commissioned the company 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.

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.

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.

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When it comes to creating a presentation, we often look out for good examples hoping to get inspired. Browsing the Prezi showcase or checking the result of other people’s work on Twitter might be a good start.

However, we couldn’t have shown you a better example then a prezi which has been created by a professional media expert and worldwide speaker. We are very proud to have Jeff Jarvis‘ recent prezi here. Jeff, a New York University professor and columnist for the Guardian gave a talk at the Aspen Institute’s Forum on Communication and Society about New Business Models for News Project a few days ago.

He has decided to use Prezi to visualize his thoughts and he told us later, he really liked working with the tool. His work is a perfect example of using Prezi to create relations, organize thoughts, show connections among elements and visualize arguments in a given topic.

Jeff, thanks for choosing Prezi!