Takahashi Method Spreads #
Daigo first covered this phenomenon in May when he posted a video of the Ruby no Kai presenting in Tokyo. Specifically, Masayoshi Takahashi (maki on Ruby-Talk and IRC) has enjoyed considerable press over his technique—The Takahashi Method—for flashing slides with monstrous symbols to enforce short lessons over the audience’s eyespace. (As an example, Maki’s slides for a speech on Rails are here.)
Six months later, it’s still brilliant, eh! A bunch of great permutations have reared up:
- Autrijus has delivered in such a style and converted to ODP, PDF, PPT and SWF!
- A XUL application for assembling such magnificent presentations. (Instructions in JP.)
- An English strategy: Large fonts, big pix.. (Neat. Still, latin characters just don’t do it the same.)
(This came back to my attention from 37signals and, subsequently, Presentation Zen, who both expand on the technique itself.)
MrCode
Interesting. Though this method seems better for Japanese or other languages with more symbolic written characters. In my opinion it doesn’t have the same impact in English. Even on Maki’s Rails slides the slide with Don’t Repeat Yourself spelled out has less impact than the more terse Japanese pages.
But as shown on the Presentation Zen page, using images along with terse English might have the same sort of feel.
Eden
A course I took by Edward Tufte two years ago proposed the same idea. The key concept is that overhead projection is low resolution compared to printed material. Thus one should restrict overhead material to visuals with high impact and include the high content material (tables, graphs, etc) in a handout. I have used this technique over the past few years and found it useful.
I disagree that this method is less effective in English. It may be necessary to take a different approach due to the difference in character sets that has been described above, but the core idea (project high visual impact material on screen, hand audience high content material on paper) remains the same.
MrCode
Yeah after watching Steve Jobs’ presentation I can see how this kind of technique can be used even with graphics and a minimum of text (though that conflicts a bit with the Takahashi Method which doesn’t use graphics.) Of course Jobs’ presentation is more of a marketing thing and not something that the audience is trying to learn from, so there isn’t a need for additional printed material (though there may have been some, I’m not sure.)
twifkak
Vocabulary > Syntax? Puh.
autrijus
Er, why “Puh”? Isn’t RoR all about Vocabulary? Or was I mistaken and it is actually a DSL in ruby? :-)
_why cult follower
YES
(but larger)
karlinfox
Yikes! Now I’ll have to strip all those words out of my RubyConf slides…
(gets to work)
MenTaLguY
PONCHO
MenTaLguY
Aww, CSS snippets are disabled in RedHanded Textile. Where’s the fun in that?
why
For many people, saying PONCHO in an approved font size which conforms to website palettes is the best kind of fun.
However, in another one of my oft-cited fits of compassion, I do understand that you’re not one of those people M’LguY. And I’m sure you’ll appreciate the complimentary bag of cashews I am sending to your home address.
The look on your face… ‘twill be pricefull.
autrijus
Much thanks for the XUL link—I’m converting all my current slides to it. Now I’d just need to hack “pre” tags into it for code snippets…
(See this for some XULness I’m working on.)
Samsung Means To Come
Young-Hae Chang has been using the Takahashi method before the Takahashi method existed.
http://yhchang.com/
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