PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS

Stop with the empty infographics: Tell a powerful visual story

Enough confusing text—write tantalizing headlines and compelling captions. Enough awful charts—produce powerful graphs with relevant data. Enough pointless, distracting colors and typefaces—develop a design that animates and quickly tells your story.

In short, if you want to create great infographics, take the editorial approach. Bob Zeni, longtime designer, journalist and teacher, brings designers and writers together to produce great stories that combine words, images and data. In this hands-on pre-conference workshop, you’ll learn how to:

• Decide the purpose of your infographic: emotional appeal, call to action or thought leadership?
• Employ a 10-step process for a successful writer-designer collaboration
• Use words, data and images that reinforce one another’s strengths
• Select high-impact images and create charts that clearly depict your data
• Transform classic news elements (lead/mainbar/sidebar/conclusion) into an infographic narrative that moves readers

Assignment: Bring a finished infographic for review and critique or a story that can best be told in an infographic.

Lunch break

Building Audiences: How to Use Video to Scale Your Brand Quickly and Effectively

We know video is an effective storytelling tool, but most people don’t know how to create interesting video that people will want to share. In Building Audiences: How to Use Video to Scale Your Brand Quickly and Effectively, you will learn how to identify, create and market your video so it gets more views, more shares and the attention you want, plus practical takeaways on how to predict success, instead of just hoping for it.

You’ll learn how to:

• Identify what is and how to create a video that will gain clicks and eyeballs
• Create effective visual storytelling easily and cheaply
• Create a clickable headline that doesn’t tick people off
• Build an audience/brand through video
• Create proprietary research and data analytics to keep your momentum going

Explanatory video storytelling: Using motion graphics to simplify complicated topics

If your video doesn’t make sense to a 5-year-old, you’re doing it wrong. In this session, Teresa Mahoney, video journalist at The Oregonian, breaks down how to use motion graphics and other creative techniques to tell compelling explanatory video stories.

What you’ll learn:

• Techniques to think visually about nonvisual topics
• Scriptwriting tips to make audiences stick around
• How to storyboard to craft a cohesive visual narrative
• How Adobe After Effects can create eye-catching motion graphics
• Other innovative ways to tell compelling stories without complicated software