In this task, I will explain the process of designing that took place before I started working in Prezi.
I printed a six-page transcript (about 4000 words) of Bryan Stevenson's TED Talk, both in English and Dutch, to fully understand it and to start working on it. Besides the printout, I used a highlighter and a pen.
This section is the most important part of the whole process.
I started reading the full transcript with a highlighter and a pen in my hand. I highlighted every word that seemed important to me and took notes in the margins. I distinguished between facts and the anecdotes that Bryan Stevenson told, because these were completely different kinds of information.
Bryan Stevenson told three stories in his speech. The first story was the story about his grandmother. The first paragraph of the story goes as follows:
I grew up in a house that was the traditional African American home that was dominated by a matriarch, and that matriarch was my grandmother. She was tough, she was strong, she was powerful. She was the end of every argument in our family. She was the beginning of a lot of arguments in our family. She was the daughter of people who were actually enslaved. Her parents were born in slavery in Virginia in the '40s. She was born in 1880 and the experience of slavery very much shaped the way she saw the world.
The second story is about Rosa Parks. She was an African-American civil rights activist and known as the "first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement." On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey the bus driver's order that she should give up her seat in the colored section to a white passenger after the white section was filled.
Bryan Stevenson had the privilege to meet Rosa Parks when he was a young lawyer. Sometimes, Rosa Parks got together with some of her dearest friends and just talked with them. Bryan Stevenson was invited to just listen, which was very energizing and empowering to him.
The third story Bryan Stevenson told in his speech was about the young kids who must stand trial as an adult.
And I was up too late one night and I starting thinking, well gosh, if the judge can turn you into something that you're not, the judge must have magic power. Yeah, Bryan, the judge has some magic power. You should ask for some of that. And because I was up too late, wasn't thinking real straight, I started working on a motion. And I had a client who was 14 years old, a young, poor black kid. And I started working on this motion, and the head of the motion was: "Motion to try my poor, 14-year-old black male client like a privileged, white 75-year-old corporate executive."
Though all these three stories are beautifully told and very impressive, I decided not to include the stories in the prezi for two reasons. The first reason was it's very difficult to visualize these stories in the right, respectful way. The second reason is that the prezi would be too long. I wanted only to take the key message and visualize this in a prezi. The prezi shouldn't be a copy of Bryan Stevenson's speech.
While looking through my highlighted words, I noticed I highlighted the word "identity" often. Some phrases were as follows:
TED has an identity.
I think identity is very important.
And so I want to talk about the power of identity.
Well I believe that our identity is at risk.
Because it's in that nexus that we actually begin to understand truly profound things about who we are.
The last sentence does not contain the word "identity" but it's clearly about identity.
Bryan Stevenson started his talk with identity and he ended it with identity. According to me, identity was the most important word in his speech. Therefore, I decided the word identity would be the key of my prezi. I also wanted to start and end the prezi with this word, just like Bryan Stevenson had done in his speech.
I didn't know exactly how I would visualize and design it, so I started to play around with the word IDENTITY on paper. It didn't take me very long to see I wanted to put information about the speech in every letter of the word IDENTITY. I wanted to start the prezi inside this word, walking through every letter, and at the end, zooming out to reveal the whole word.
IDENTITY consists of eight letters, so I needed eight pieces of information. I went through my notes, puzzled with the pieces, and came to the following parts of the speech of Bryan Stevenson:
- Identity is really important. When we create the right kind of identity, we can say things to the world around us. When we get them to do things that they don't think they can do.
- Facts about (black) people in prison in the US:
- 1972: 300,000 people
- 2012: 2.3 million people
- One out of three black men between the ages 18 and 30 is in jail, in prison, on probation or parole.
- Mass detention, that is, in Bryan Stevenson's state Alabama, 34 percent of the black male population has permanently lost the right to vote.
- We have a system of justice that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent.
- It's 11 times more likely that someone will get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black, and 22 times more likely if the defendant is black and the victim white. Do they deserve to die? Do we deserve to kill people?
- We love innovation, technology, creativity, and entertainment. Those realities are shadowed by suffering, abuse, degradation, and marginalization.
- Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. If somebody tells a lie, they're not just a liar. If somebody takes something that doesn't belong to them, they're not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer.
- Equal Justice Initiative: The opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.
- Ultimately, you judge the character of a society, not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and the privileged, but by how they treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated. Because it's in that nexus that we actually begin to understand truly profound things about who we are.
Now, I could start building and testing what I wanted in Prezi. However, before I did that, I had a few more considerations that were important to me:
- I really wanted to share the key message of the prezi to show the importance of the subject and to add my small contribution
- I intentionally did not put any ads in the prezi to make sure the focus was on the message and not on my company, Prezi University
- The style I wanted was black and white, sober and clean, and no fancy colors
- I wanted to use all the new features of Prezi, such as audio, 3D backgrounds, and animations (just because I like these features so much) and I thought it was a good idea to try out these features for the contest
- I wanted to end the prezi with a tribute to Bryan Stevenson
Now, I was ready to start in the prezi.
In this task, I explained my process of collecting information and setting up the concept of the prezi. These are the most important steps in the whole design process.
What I did is as follows:
- Print the transcript
- Read it very carefully while highlighting important words and taking notes in the margins
- Start brainstorming with the highlighted information and notes
- Decide the beginning and ending style of the prezi—the prezi should start with the word
IDENTITYand should end with it - Decide which information will be placed in the word
IDENTITY - Find out what pieces should go in which letter of the word
IDENTITY
Another interesting thing to do when you have a bunch of text is to create a wordle out of it. This is a word cloud that gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.
One of the sites where you can create word clouds is www.wordle.net.
The following image is the world cloud of the transcript of Bryan Stevenson's speech:
