Maybe you have seen those really nice hand-drawn prezis and you were wondering how they were made? Did you ever think of creating them yourself?
We hear you say, "I can't draw." Well, we know you can. You might not be the greatest artist, but that's not necessary. We'll draw only simple objects. Drawings will help your audience to understand and remember your story. As children, visual thinking was natural to us. It's not lost, let's use it.
In this project, you'll see a few examples of hand-drawn prezis. You'll also find them on www.prezihotshot.com.
The first example is a prezi of TrendSketcher Anna Luise Sulimma. She created this for her speech on Prezi Day 2013.
The second example shows a prezi created for the Dutch Gymnastics Union:
The third example is from learning futurist Maria Andersen's The Future of Working:
In this project, we will teach you how to create your own hand-drawn prezis. We will not make it too complex, we'll leave that for the professionals.
We think simple drawings work the best, especially for Prezi. The idea is that drawing adds value (and some fun) to your story.
We have created the following story for our own prezi.
Sometimes, you have those days when everything seems to be negative—dark clouds arise above your head and there is lightning in your brain. You've lost overview; you don't know what to do. The reason—your head is too full. How can you get rid of these thoughts? How can you lighten up and be positive again? The following are five useful ideas:
- Go outside and dive into nature. Take a long walk in the woods and let the thoughts fly away.
- Write down everything that's in your mind.
- Start painting. It doesn't matter what it looks like, just throw your thoughts on the canvas.
- Try to rethink your thoughts. Is it really that bad? Can you change it? Can you get help for it?
- Smile! A big laugh helps you to be positive again.
Just five ideas to let the sun shine again, at least for today.
Visual thinking is awesome. Visualizations in the forms of diagrams, pictures, and drawings help you to understand complex information. It's a way of organizing your thoughts to communicate more clearly. It's way of solving complex problems and thinking faster. Visual thinking is more natural to us than you might think. As children, we loved to draw. However, at some point in our life, we learned drawing is for artists. It's not. If you can draw a circle, triangle, rectangle, a line, an arc, and a dot, that's enough. With simple drawings, you can tell the best stories.
If you want to dive into visual thinking, read the book The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam.
The major tasks to complete in this project are:
- Let's draw!
- From a drawing to a vectorized image
- Putting it together in Prezi
To vectorize our drawing, we'll need Adobe Illustrator. To create our drawings, we'll only need white paper and a pen, pencil, or marker.
Adobe Illustrator is used because it has the ability to export to SWF. We need SWF because of it's transparency capability. Most other software that create vectorized drawings can only export to a PDF, and a PDF is never transparent.
Alternatives to Adobe Illustrator are GIMP (www.gimp.org) and Inkscape (www.inkscape.org), but you'll need plugins to be able to export to SWF.