look at "visual thesaurus" - they use this technique.

i think you are most likely looking at flash, but what you are describing sounds fairly sophisticated and will come with a steep learning curve.

yah, you probably need to go flash... i've faked it a little bit with some of the animation tools in keynote... i assume that you could do the same stuff with powerpoint... if you need some inspiration, check out bjarke ingels' TED talk.

french -

we love prezi - with some reservations...

http://prezi.com/

it grabs attention, it has the dynamism you're looking for, but it's also not TOO gimmicky that is gets overly tiring. you have to be careful that you control your zooming so your (especially older generation) audience doesn't get disoriented.

the reservations have to do with its fluki-ness - i wouldn't depend on it as your only option. have a back-up plan. sometimes we've had file sizes get big enough that we've had to revert to an old standard and not use it.

if you decide to go for it, go ahead and subscribe. you can use it, see if you like it, have bigger file sizes and more options, and then - if you don't like it - cancel before you've paid for it.

All the best presentations (from the perspective of the presentation design itself) have been in flash. Though it sounds intimidating, you can do a whole lot with a solid black background and some well conceived tweens.

Thank you guys.
Steven, I'll check out prezi, but I'll definitely try to get my brother, who is a flahs master and designed our website, to help me on this.
fortunately, i have a month and a half to figure this out.
Thanks again for the input!

Thank you guys.
Steven, I'll check out prezi, but I'll definitely try to get my brother, who is a flahs master and designed our website, to help me on this.
fortunately, i have a month and a half to figure this out.
Thanks again for the input!

the question is, are you just going to spend a lot of time fancying up your slideshow, and distracting you and your audience from the content? i'm not being snarky - its just probably something you should ask yourself.

i understand your concern agfa8x. And I don't want to distract the audience from the content of course. but i do think that our workflow, our way of handling the projects is not necessary powerpoint typed, so i was thinking that showing that directly in the presentation format was in a way going to help the audience to understand our methods. My thesis project, back in the late 90's, was about new media and architecture, amongst other things. I have always thought that the way you represent is closely tied to the way you think, or project as a matter of facts. So to me it makes sense to work on a lecture as a specific project as important as any other.