The Magic of the Metaphor with Mandy Schild
Mandy Schild is a Prezi expert and an excellent professional that helps companies and teams develop their journey to tell their stories, supporting them with content and design services.
In this masterclass lesson, Mandy teaches us about the Magic of the Metaphor and how to bring visuals metaphors to Prezi presentations.
In most cases, companies use visuals and text that are not actually linked to each other. So, she teaches us how to take presentations to the next level without using bullet points. Mandy affirms that you need to think about how you can get measures in a way, so visual metaphors guide your audience during the presentation.
What is a Visual Metaphor?
Metaphors are intuitive patterns of thoughts. She explains that metaphors make complex things easier, and she gives an example of a metaphor putting the future in front of us and the past behind us.
Also, metaphors are intuitive patterns for design. She explains how we can use objects as metaphors to explain a specific situation. You need to think about intuitive things and use them as visual metaphors to tell your story.
The main goal of a visual metaphor is to help your audience remember your content better. There are plenty of metaphors that you might have seen before, for example, the “iceberg metaphor,” in which you see the tip and what’s below the surface.
Integrate Visuals into your Presentation
Moreover, Mandy explains how to make sure that smart visuals are integrated into the presentation. Presenting is so much more than presenting with bullets; it’s about making your message memorable. A good exercise is to play with intuitive patterns to integrate smart visuals into your presentations, for example, using a rough sea to explain a complex situation.
Prezi and Prezi Video are great tools to take your audience on a journey, using metaphors to help them understand your message.
Learn how to use Prezi Video and engage your audience throught videoconference meetings and events.
6 Tips for Effective Visual Metaphor in your Presentations
A Prezi presentation can be a great way to help you get your story in a visual way. You can find several Prezi Templates that you could use to tell your story with great metaphors.
Make sure to check our lesson on What is a Prezi Template? and the Advanced section on Working with Templates.
Also, she suggests that mountains can be a great visual metaphor to describe goals. A mountain is climbing, goals, and efforts, so it would be smart to have them in your Prezi to communicate strategies.
Here are some tips and tricks that Mandy shares with us to effectively use visual metaphors.
In order to make the right moves and make sure your audience understands your metaphor, you should keep metaphors simple. The purpose of a metaphor is to clear up concepts, so if it takes you a long time to explain a connection between two concepts, use another comparison.
Another tip to effectively use metaphors is to be original. Mandy affirms that a cliché is always a metaphor, but a metaphor doesn’t always have to be a cliché. This means that you need to challenge yourself and don’t fall into a metaphor that everybody is using; if you are original, you will engage your audience.
To be relevant is another tip that Mandy mentions. When using a metaphor, the two concepts have to be linked to one another in some way. It’s all about reaching a conclusion together and seeing the big picture to feel like an “aha moment.”
Another tip is the importance of the metaphor. This means that not everything that you share needs to be a comparison. You need to use metaphors strategically, using the metaphor to emphasize a concept.
Emotions are one of the most important tips that she mentions, not only talking about metaphors but also the whole presentation. You need to think; What do you want them to remember? Metaphors usually help get emotions a bit deeper; you can use sensory experiences in a metaphor, such as sight, feeling, scent, taste, or hearing.
Finally, you should target your audience and consider using metaphors that will be relevant to the public in order to increase effectiveness.
Don’t forget to check Guilherme Criscuolo’s Prezi Video Hacks!