Creating the Assessment Prezi

April 15, 2011 | General

And so our midterm assessment came and went. To clarify, we Communication & Multimedia Design students aren’t tested in the conventional way with questions and the like, but we have to prove our understanding and progression by presenting what and how we’ve been doing to our teachers.

To see how that went you can check out the timelapse below of our day of preparation and the assessment itself:

In order to convey ourselves more clearly we’ve made use of presentation software called Prezi. Prezi is a canvas like tool where you can add text, videos, images and create a path from beginning to end. For the assessment Prezi mainly acted as our guide.

Now we said we would share our Assessment Prezi as soon as possible, so excuse the lateness, but we thought it would be fun to give some additional context in this blogpost.

As the main architect of the Prezi, I’ll guide you through the creation process.
Note: it’s in Dutch, so sorry international folk

We’ve been dabbling with Prezi for quite some time now and used it to support our last assessment. Using Prezi again was a logical choice and I was curious to see how I could push the program further. For this one I took inspiration from a progress report Sinne had made coupled with classic boardgames which I love so very, very much and kinetic typography which I likewise love very, very much.

The Prezi is divided in several clusters, each covering a specific subject. At first it introduces Trailhead, its members, website and so on, giving the assessors and the peergroup a look at our inner workings. Sinne had made an introductory timelapse which neatly fit into that while also demonstrating Prezi’s capabilities.

I made sure to keep text to a minimum and only use it to introduce or summarize segments. To illustrate ourselves I’ve made heavy use of images instead. This allows for the audience to quickly grasp the subject and reduces ‘wall-of-text’ fatigue. It also enabled me to create the grid-like clusters and add that bit of visual flair I err… love so very, very much.

The images are mainly photos of our many adventures, along with webfinds, screengrabs and illustrations we used for our projects. Notice the mugshots next to/inside each segment to tell the audience who’s about to speak.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s very tempting to just go wild, fiddle around with crazy animations and have your Prezi jump about like a schizophrenic rollercoaster, but when the goal for the Prezi is to provide context and guide the assessment, having your assessors go into full seizure isn’t helping.

Crazy antics are therefore kept to a minimum and where any sudden movements occur I’ve placed words and images into the frame prepare the audience for what’s to come. Arrows aid in this as well as they tell where the Prezi will take them next.
The arrows aren’t stock Prezi, but were made in Illustrator. Next to the bold and juicy Helvetica the standard arrows just looked underwhelming

If you plan to implement custom graphics as well, make sure you save them at high resolutions as low resolution images will get mighty pixel-y when you want to zoom in.
It’ll make the Prezi bigger and loading times longer, but it’s definitely worth it if you’re looking for that crisp and slick look.

It took some time to put it all together, cross-referencing with our documentation, searching and picking images and creating the clusters. I estimate I invested some 7 to 8 hours, but it was well spent given the result.
Most importantly though, it was great fun.

If you want to take a stab at it, which you should , create an account using your school email address and you’ll get all sorts of neat perks.

Isaak