One challenge, in particular, stood between our contestants and good design. Guesses?

The most sophisticated (and highest ranking) designs used a single large image on each slide. Whether that image was a photo or even a lot of empty space (an image of nothingness) didn’t matter. A good image triggers reactions which profit the designer.

The problem then is how to fuse text to the images.

You all had plenty of solutions, some more successful than others:

Use a solid color field.

Use a semi-solid color field.

Use high-contrast areas of your photo.

Outline the text.

Drop shadow the text.

On his respectable third place finish, Jeffrey demures:

when you look at [my design] after seeing neil’s (or paul’s or ethan’s), it’s as if i did my design by mashing my fingers on the keyboard. just no finesse compared to his.

Jeffrey’s self-assessment is overly modest but I think he accurately surveys his wild successes and flopped ambitions. His running visual gag was my favorite. His was also far and away the funniest entry (though Paulo’s wins for glibness). In a field crowded with inspiration and feelgoodery, I appreciated the moxy it took to put Cambridge on a slide and ignore it for the sake of bridge jumping. If I were Chicago GSB, I’d stage Jeffrey’s interview at a downtown pub.

Two problems.

Anyway, sense of humor, sense of story, visual sense, all very much intact here. Fusing text to image, though, seems to overwhelm him.

In all fairness, his images – colorful pictures of Earth with varying contrast on hills, streets, oceans – are some of the most difficult to play with. He hedges his bets across drop shadows and outlines, spreading his losses evenly over the two of them.

The text also varies in location which means the audience has to process factors which don’t matter to Jeffrey.

Confronted with a new slide, we, the audience, have to process:

1. the geographic location (Colombus, Cambridge, etc.)
2. the number of times Jeffrey has done something (1 time, 2 times, etc.)
3. what that thing is (backing into a garage, etc.)

Which is pretty ambitious. Information density is high. Jeffrey helps us out by keeping a steady hierarchy: the cities are in one font style (white text, black outline), the number of times in another, and the activities in another.

He could’ve made life even easier for us, though, by orienting each of those elements consistently on each new slideConsider the easy readability of Neil’s slides, how they eliminate irrelevant factors by keeping all the important information in the same place every time.. Because, as is, we also have to process:

1. where the locations are oriented in the slides
2. where the quantities are oriented in the slides
3. where the activities are oriented in the slides

Jeffrey was a good enough sport to let me have a run at his project. Here are a couple solutions for his first three slides.

Use a solid color field.

Use a semi-solid color field.

Drop the color field but add a dark vignette for contrast.

There are other options, certainly, but we’ve made a good-faith attempt to solve two serious issues:

1. readability (the drop shadow / outline problem)
2. noise (the scattered placement of elements)

Along the way I think we’ve also enhanced Jeffrey’s “one, two, three” sequence, which wasn’t immediately obvious to me with the original.

I welcome other suggestions, a rebuttal from Jeffrey perhaps, and, especially, commentary from teachers uncertain how this relates at all to teaching. Odds are good, unfortunately, that they haven’t made it this far.