In her TEDx talk, Shape Your Thinking, Brandy Agerbeck introduces the concept of LIBLABs. These spaces blend the best of LIBraries and LABoratories — engaging hands-on, visual and spatial learners and stretching the text-based, auditory learners in new ways. Brandy, a leader in the graphic facilitation field and lifelong drawer, details the 3 components of successful LIBLABs: Permission, Tools and Environment, Support. We will actively design our own LIBLABs both individually and as a group. You will leave with your personal blueprint to create your own space for visual thinking.

What does it take to create great visual content to support technical documentation, reference and other content? Do you have to be a graphic designer or artist to make effective content? Believe it or not, it’s not all about you and your creations. It’s actually about everyone else and getting their feedback.

In this workshop, not only will you learn a few clever ideas to help you keep your design looking professional and useful, we’re going to run a design review. Believe it or not, at least half of good visual design isn’t about you or what you create it’s about the feedback you get.

We’ll layout ground rules for a design critique session. Work through suggestions for getting the most meaning out of the feedback and not just hear ‘I don’t like it.’ We’ll practice providing feedback on visual elements and help you overcome the ‘But I don’t know anything about that!’ for yourself and those reviewing your work.

So while you may not be an expert in visual design and would prefer to ‘just work with words’ come explore with us how you can do more with a little feedback.

How many times have you sat in a presentation and felt like you were going to die from boredom? How many times have you delivered a presentation that had people wanting to run for the aisle? Maybe the message was great, but it got lost in a boring presentation with slides that distracted from, rather than supported, the message. We all have to communicate every day. Whether it be one-on-one, with small groups, or to large audiences, we all have a story to tell to an audience that needs to hear, understand, and often act on what we’re communicating. As marketing and sales professionals, this could not be more true. It’s up to us to help our audience get it.

During this session, we’ll take a look at the highlights of designing world-class presentations. We’ll cover tips for crafting a good story, designing effective visuals, and giving your audience something they’ll always remember. If you have to deliver sales presentations to potential customers, status reports to executives or internal project teams, teaching a lecture to students, presenting a report to your classmates, pitches to angel investors & VCs, or frankly any presentations at all, this session is for you.

So you think you know charts & graphs, but do you really? From print to television to the web, people get charts and graphs wrong all the time.  During this session, we’ll look at some of the ways to select the right chart or graph for your data and then talk about the design essentials to help you tell your message with those charts & graphs.

Visuals are powerful attention-getters for organizations of all sizes and can convey information quickly and easily. But all visuals begin with a discussion of who the audience is and what the goal of the visual is. In this energetic and fun session, Karl Gude, an accomplished designer and artist, will show how to spot opportunities for visual storytelling within your own organization and then give you some ideas for finding the right visual tools you can use (lots of free ones!) to make all kinds of infographics.

Ann and Charlie will present examples from their experiences at the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum and observations of sister organizations. Some of these examples include:

Museum and Gallery Layout

Programming
· Graphic treatment and layout of learning aids
· Lab environment
· Costuming
· Props

Exhibits
· Interactive exhibit content
· Interactive labeling
· Subject and market (age group) branding

They will explain how these examples represent a general practice and identify emerging trends. In addition, they will discuss how visual education principles may be applied in other settings, including home, school and the workplace.