Ever since I came across this set in flickr from Alan Levine, I’ve both admired and used several of these images in my presentations. Most recently I downloaded about 30 of them and simply ran them prior to a presentation. Good way to set the mood.
I’ve consciously and subconsciously tried to recreate the idea a few times but decided today to begin a set of my own. Beginning with one I created earlier this month, I was inspired to capture a quote from the recent article in the NY Times on literacy. The quote isn’t necessarily true, it is a reflection of one perspective.
While I’ll likely continue to create images based on interesting quotes, I decided to scan my blog for recent quotes I thought were worthy of an image. Beginning with George Siemens quote about short attention spans and superficial learning. I went through an interesting process in finding what I felt was an appropriate image.
Using a Creative Commons search, I thought about searching for an image of multi-tasking. I found a few but felt the message here was not so much about that as it was about the depth of connections. The easy choice is to try and go literal. However, I’m finding that as I explore and become more adept at using imagery, a little abstractness and dissonance is a good thing. I then tried to find something about connections. Still not happy. Shallow would seem to be the next choice but it wasn’t until I visualized a person walking along a beach that I entered “wading” to find the image I wanted. After adding the quote and flickr credit, this was the end result:
It’s not the only way to go but it’s one way.
The more I think about design, imagery and communication, the more I think that developing key images to attach to a few of my favourite and most meaningful quotes is a worthwhile habit to form and to share. It should go without saying but since I still get many emails, feel free to use any of these in your own presentations.
If you’d like to subscribe to my Interesting Quotes set you can do so by clicking the RSS feed at the bottom of the flickr page.