By Julia Frenkle
Today I gave a very exciting presentation. I met with the HULT Prize regional winners at IXL Center to give them a presentation on basic graphic design principles. The 8 innovative groups have come up with amazing ideas around improving healthcare which they are going to present in September and compete for the prize of $1 Million to implement their idea.To help them communicate their ideas visually and convince the judges that their idea is the worthy one, I introduced them to Maki, the graphic design tutorial for non-designers that we created at Opus Design. The presentation is not intended to turn non-designers into designers, but teach them a few actionable, bite-size lessons they can leverage when they create their own web design, presentation design or brochures. Basically, the presentation teaches how to do as much as you can on your own without having to hire the design professionals (and when to stop and give us a ring :) ).
During a 60 min presentation I discussed:
- branding: setting the underlying strategy for your communications
- 5 graphic design principles to leverage in their design: hierarchy, alignment, fonts, color, and graphics'
- design evaluation: how to evaluate and iterate until the design successfully communicates the story
- examples: lots of examples of successful and less successful design to practice evaluating how to leverage design to communicate
After the presentation, everyone was equipped to take a critical look at the work they had created so far. I met with each group individually and evaluated their slides, website, logos, and brochures following the design principles we had discussed. It was really fun to see everyone learn very quickly and make improvements to communicate more clearly with their visuals. With the new design tools, the teams will continue to evaluate and revise their design work and create amazing presentations. The question is, which presentation will win the $1 million?!
"It was really fun to see everyone learn very quickly and make improvements to communicate more clearly with their visuals."— Julia Frenkle
