Three Tips for Bringing Your Ideas to Life
Have you ever created something you knew wasn’t quite right yet? But you weren’t sure how to bring your idea fully to life?
I have. Earlier this year, I created a PowerPoint deck, and it featured a slide with some crucial information. But the challenge was that every time a trainer pulled that slide up during a training, they presented it differently. Four different presenters talked about it four different ways! Some would expound on it for thirty minutes and derail the training. Others would zoom through it in thirty seconds, but they failed to make crucial points.
I knew the solution was to create a video to replace the static slide. A video plays the same every time, the messaging is consistent, and you have much more control over the quality of its presentation.
Over the years, as I create training materials, a few guidelines have helped me move through a challenging creation process. Here are my tips for bringing your own ideas to life, and how I incorporated them into my process for creating the video “Speech Analytics—What’s That?”
Borrow Ideas
I started with a small nugget of inspiration for my video idea. I had a seen a tiny GIF that someone else had created, where the zoom feature interacted with colors and created a cool transition effect. I kept that idea in the back of my mind for weeks and let it percolate.
You can do that too – just curate things that resonate with you. Collecting your ideas in one place is a great place to start. Here’s an electronic mood board that I created in One Note for a branding project. They’re all stock images, but it gave me a place to pull inspiration when I was ready to start building my ideas.
Draw It Out
I know drawing can be intimidating for some—I hear so many say, “I can barely draw a stick figure!” But drawing is a human instinct. It’s about creating symbols and putting them into a meaningful arrangement, not about depicting real life. I learned from this great article that drawing helps you formulate your ideas in a way that’s more effective than mere words.
Here’s the sketch I made to illustrate what I wanted to accomplish. It’s messy. I’m not even sure most would recognize the final product as a match for this. But it helped me to map out my ideas in a visual way.
Next time you’re struggling to bring an idea to life, try drawing it out. White board, napkin, doodle, it doesn’t matter—just get it out of your brain and into a visual format.
Phone a Friend
I’ve learned through experience that while it may feel scary to show the world your newborn project, the best thing is to grit your teeth, and show it to someone who can give you feedback. The payoff is worth it: hearing someone else’s experience of my creation always improves my own understanding of it.
For my video, I ran it by my boss, who gave some great feedback (“I love it, the transitions are so cool”) along with some good pointers (“I think the wording needs some tweaking”). He offered some invaluable tips on simplifying the verbiage, and the video is much better for it.
Once you’ve come up with your first draft, try running it past someone you trust and getting some baseline feedback. Understanding someone else’s perception of it can change the way you see your own project and transform it for the better. There’s lots of ways to leave feedback; I love the Review 360 feature of Articulate - anyone with the link can review your creation and leave some feedback, like this:
So how did that challenging video project turn out? Here’s the original slide, and the final video that replaced it:
