Teaching Visual Communication in a Business Communication Course

Visual communications, especially presentations, are an opportunity to distill complex information into digestible pieces. Here’s a collection of visual communication blogs to inspire your next great presentation.

Jer Thorp creates beautiful data visualizations to put abstract data into a human context.

At TEDxVancouver, he shares his moving projects, from graphing an entire year’s news cycle, to mapping the way people share articles across the Internet. . .

You can create infographics - visual representations of data - from scratch using free web tools. Educator Linda W. Braun takes you step by step.

The hot new concept in data visualization is "data storytelling."

"The format alone virtually guarantees viral sharing provided you follow these steps to make sure your infographic doesn’t disappoint."

An audience can't listen to your presentation and read detailed, text-heavy slides at the same time (not without missing key parts of your message, anyway). 

So make sure your slides pass what I call the glance test: People should be able to comprehend each one in about three seconds)

Think of your slides as billboards. When people drive, they only briefly take their eyes off their main focus — the road — to process billboard information. Similarly, your audience should focus intently on what you're saying, looking only briefly at your slides when you display them. .

Note: Bovee & Thill's textbooks are recognized in the field as having the best coverage of presentations and presentation tools, including PowerPoints.

The stunning designs you'll find via this blog post are proof that it's not PowerPoint or Keynote that are to blame for mediocre presentations, but the way they are used.

To quote the author: "There’s a certain art to putting together a solid presentation and PowerPoint and Keynote are the primary tools of the trade. The “art” comes into play when you’re trying to set yourself apart; so how you use the tools is of great importance.

Often it is the design of the presentation itself that does the trick. In an effort to help you put together a great-looking presentation, here are 28 examples of creative presentation designs using Powerpoint and Keynote." . . .

Get inspired by the following 16 examples of data visualization that communicate interesting information with both style and substance.

Here are libraries for plotting data on maps, frameworks for creating charts, graphs and diagrams and tools to simplify the handling of data.

Even if you’re not into programming, you’ll find applications that can be used without writing one single line of code. Many of these tools are relatively simple to use, and others are more advanced. . .

This is a tutorial website in which the history of visual communication is covered from cave paintings to the present day digital systems. . .

Let’s be honest, we don’t like to read big pieces of text. Text-heavy graphs are rather difficult for understanding, especially when we deal with numbers and statistics. That is why we use illustrations and flowcharts for such kind of information.

It’s no wonder that today we know a method to make our life easier. It called an infographic – a visual representation of study or data.

But like anything else, it can be done right or wrong ( I’m sure you've seen poor ones). How to create a cool infographic? The secret is in a long-time brainstorming. You need a really cool idea and good design. . . .

Note: Bovee & Thill proivides thorough coverage of infographics in each of their business communication textbooks, a topic rarely covered in other texts.