#beverageconcept

||Week 6||

~^*WHAT DID YOU TRY? *^~

I began the task by first downloading Loom straight after the week 6 tutorial when it was suggested by my tutor. Then I took to InDesign, where I began designing my slides!

I had no idea where to start so I basically began by creating a ‘framework’ for my presentation, experimenting with the layout and what I would like to include. This was relatively easy and only took a bit of trial and error. Following this I was able to insert the necessary texts & images in their ‘allocated’ positions and only had a bit of fiddling around to do with sizing and colours.

When it came to recording, I stuck with Loom and figured out how to open my slides in Acrobat in full screen mode.

~^*WHAT DID & DIDN’T WORK? *^~

What I found extremely helpful was briefly creating the framework for my slides before really jumping into it. It really gave me some sort of direction to follow instead of chucking in a bunch of images and text and thinking “well.. now what?”. Here are images of the layout I went with (each x2).

 It took a few trials to get to to the final layout however. I initially was going to use slide 1 to give a description of the drink itself so peers had an idea of my overall concept to help them make more informed choices when voting for a visual direction. This didn’t last long once I decided that would take up too much space&time I could use for more important things. See my scrapped idea below.

Another thing that worked was using Loom to record the audio! It was so easy to download and navigate many thanks to Loom. I was worried it would be an annoying process to work out how to use the program. 

What didn’t want to work though was my presenting skills. I tried to just dot point a few ideas and speak from the top of my head to sound more like I was talking to an audience. Only took a couple of takes for me to realise this was much harder than I thought, so I then wrote a very rough ‘script’ to go off when recording. This was very helpful.

Another annoying side note of what didn’t work was the fact that in Acrobat I couldn’t hide my cursor from being visible. But I just moved it to the side and kept it still.

~^*WHAT ADVICE WOULD I GIVE OTHERS? *^~

The advice I would give is to 100% start off simple when creating your slides even if its just a few random text boxes in a certain arrangement! What began as an “Oh I should probably start my presentation but don’t have the mental energy to put much effort into it tonight” actually ended up being such a great head-start when I finally sat down to power through it. 

As for the recording, this may sound strange, but what I found useful was to make a lot of dramatic hand gestures at my laptop when I was talking. Feels silly waving your hands at your screen, but really helps you to sound more as if you were talking to an audience rather than having the dreaded robot-monotone voice if you’re reading mostly from a script as I was!

~^*THE FINAL PRODUCT! *^~

Woohoo! (minus the voice recording)