Designing a Presentation About Design

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Yesterday April and I were fortunate enough to present at the Amigos Annual Member Conference. Their theme for this year was Ingenuity, Imagination, and Innovation: Using Creative Solutions in Today’s Library, which we thought was a great opportunity to share the creativity on display on Librarian Design Share.

Here are the slides from our presentation.

Librarian Design Share from Veronica Douglas

Look familiar? We tried to feature different designs you’ve shared with us as well as some of our own. I used Photoshop to create all of the slides (1024 px x 768 px), then inserted them as images into a Google Presentation that April and I worked on together. It was kind of a pain, but it was the only way to use the font selection from the Librarian Design Share logo in Google Presentations. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the results.

We had a great time presenting and learned a lot from the folks that came to hear us speak. Thanks, Amigos!

If you’d like to adapt or reuse any of the Photoshop slide files, send me an email.

Legal Research on the Go

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Our goal here at Librarian Design Share is to be able to inspire you with creative ideas so that you can take them back and modify them for your own use in your library. David McClure, Head of Research and Curriculum Services at the Wiener-Rogers Law Library at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, had done just this, and we’re so impressed with the results.

Here is David’s description of the design process:

For some time, our library had considered various ways to share information on legal research apps with our students and faculty. While reviewing the ALL-SIS Task Force on Library Marketing & Outreach’s Academic Law Library Marketing & Outreach Toolkit, I ran across a reference to the Librarian Design Share blog. The January 23, 2013, post on “Advertising a Tablet Page” provided the creative spark (and the template) to make the handout a reality. We converted the template from Publisher to Pages format, and we increased the image size to create a full-page handout.

Special thanks to April Aultman Becker and the Librarian Design Share blog for sharing the Publisher template with us. Library research assistants Jessica Perlick, Elizabeth Ellison, and Andrew Stagg also contributed their excellent research and design skills, along with their creativity and enthusiasm, to the project.

A PDF version of the handout is available for download through the Scholarly Commons @ UNLV Law at http://scholars.law.unlv.edu/refdeskguides/8. For the Pages version, please contact David McClure (david.mcclure@unlv.edu).

David mentioned that this was his first project with Pages and that he enjoyed the program’s flexibility when it came to manipulating images. Anyone else out there using Pages? We’d love to see!

A Presentation Completed!

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Last month I posted a work in progress. I was using Powerpoint for the first time in years to create slides to accompany a presentation I was giving with my colleague Abe Korah at the Texas Library Association 2013 Conference. The conference has come and gone, the presentation went well (yay!) and the slide deck is complete. I thought I’d share it with everyone here.

TLA Presentation 2013 – Final Version from Veronica Douglas

It obviously doesn’t make a lot of sense apart from the presentation, but that’s ok. I think a good Powerpoint should be used to enhance a presentation, not be the primary mode of information dissemination during the session. They’re listening to you, not reading!

If you have a great presentation you’d like to share, don’t forget to submit it to us here.

Democratizing Design

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What do you do if you’ve labored for hours (or days or weeks) over a design and your coworkers just don’t like it?

When I create something new, I always show the prototype to a few key people as I’m in process. I can get their early opinions and shift my design if it’s necessary before spending too much time and energy on it. In my dream world, I would use 5 or 10 minutes of our monthly staff meeting to project my designs on the big screen, and everyone would care as much as I do about colors, images, and spacing, and readily and openly share their thoughts on each element of the publication.

But this doesn’t actually happen in real life…you’re lucky if you get someone to say “yeah, I like it,” right? And if they say something negative, like your design is too simple, or that it misses the point, or that –gasp– it’s unprofessional, it almost becomes a personal affront. This is because design often feels very personal after you’ve poured your time and energy into it. However, it’s important to remember that when someone contests your handout, infographic, or web slides, they really aren’t attacking you. It’s likely that the person is just coming from a different perspective, and it’s worth hearing them out and considering revising because design, in essence, is not personal at all. Design is for the public, so it is of the utmost importance to consider the public’s reaction to a design.

A situation like this recently happened in my library, and the solution was to have our staff vote in an anonymous survey (we used SurveyMonkey) on their top choice between two designs. Be prepared, though, in a democracy, your choice doesn’t always win!

Hjørring Public Library: Sleep With the Fishes

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This is the last post in our series on Hjørring Public Library in Denmark. It’s a little late (sorry, Martin!), but trust me, we saved the best for last. Here’s Martin Jørgensen, Digital Librarian, to tell you about a truly amazing library display:

Here in Scandinavia Nordic crime fiction (Nordic noir) is all the rage, and a lot of our patrons check out crime fiction. Only trouble is that there is a good deal of different crime series to keep track of, so at first we made a simple catalogue, listing the order in which the novels and series should be read. We wanted to make a cover and visual line that related to the genre of crime fiction, suspense, gore and even killing. That theme quickly developed to different ways to kill off books.

Books were sawed in half with a chain saw.

Books were shot! A coworker is also a hunter, so he took a pile of discarded books, shot them and smeared red paint all over. (By the way, guns are strictly prohibited in all forms in Denmark except from hunters.)

Discarded books were made into bookguns with the help of power tools. Photos of all killed off books were taken for the cover of our crime fiction catalog and the shot, sawed, and cut out books were put on display in the library.

For our most recent version we decided to drown the books mafioso-style with chains. With the help of the local Nordsøen Oceanarium we got permission to drown books in one of their huge aquariums, and photograph and film the process, which now can be seen online (the title “Mord i serier – Seriemord” roughly translates into “Murders in series – Serial murders”).

So now our Sleeps With the Fishes project is a package consists of a new cover and updated catalogue, a commercial movie, display pieces (aka. the drowned but now dry books), posters, slides for infoscreens, and roll-ups.

Book Club Displays in a School Library

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Full disclosure: I think Mary Chance is a display genius. I had the pleasure of working with her and creating displays with her years back at a high school library, and she taught me everything I know about Microsoft Publisher and crafting with paper!

Mary has since moved on to be the solo librarian at Alvin Junior High in Alvin, TX. She told me that she no longer has time to develop and design all that she wants to in her library, so she is training students to help her. Mary says the students come up with the design, and she just makes it possible for them to execute it. Her only rule with the revolving display is that the existing one cannot be taken down until there is a replacement.

The library hosts many book clubs each year, and often well-known authors make an appearance (Eoin Colfer is scheduled for next month). The students design a mobile poster to promote the book club, and Mary rolls it through the school during lunch periods to attract interest and talk to students about the featured book.

Below are Mary’s latest book club displays for Beastly, Unwind, and The Adoration of Jenna Fox, and you can see that she has taught her students well.

Contact Mary Chance if you’d like to know more information about her displays. Parental permission was obtained before posting these pictures.

Hjørring Public Library Part 2: Library-Wide Display Themes

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Part 2 of our 3 part series on displays at Hjørring Public Library continues with a great example of designing an entire library’s worth of displays around a single theme. Again, here’s Digital Librarian Martin Jørgensen on his library’s display philosophy:

When it comes to displays we try to make a theme going through the entire library. Right now the theme is “5″ because, the library was opened 5 years ago. The “5″ displays are a broad range of subjects: 5 things to do in the garden, 5 philosophers, my 5 favorite comic books and so on. Other themes have been more abstract, like “Brown” which had displays about East Germany and a huge collection of gravy boats (brown gravy is pretty much a Danish national dish).

Martin has shared some images from the library’s theme “Meals,” which included “ (among other things) beautiful set tables (made by a store nearby), herbs growing on the shelves and a model made by me [Martin] of an American diner.