Ask any caterer what they think the most important aspect of their business is, and most of them will probably tell you that it is food presentation. This refers to the way in which food is designed and placed. While such details may seem trivial, there are actually many benefits to knowing how to best present a dish.

Adequate nutrition is certainly important, but people have long been subjected to psychological influence related to food. For centuries, food presentation has been considered an art, a skill that requires knowledge to master. When you stop to consider the fact that many children refuse to eat common foods like vegetables mainly due to their appearance, you quickly realize that food presentation deserves some recognition.

Food Presentation is Used Everywhere
Aside from getting testy kids to finish their dinner, isn’t it nice to actually enjoy a meal every once in a while? In a world dominated by fast food restaurants, many families do not cook meals at home anymore. This is unfortunate for many reasons, not to mention the health concerns these habits raise.

Nevertheless, food presentation is used by the advertising industry as well. Have you ever looked at the billboard and signs posted by companies like McDonalds and Starbucks? If you have been paying attention, you have probably realized that food is displayed in an attractive light. This is not coincidental; catering companies recognize how much of an impact a properly decorated dinner plate can have versus one that is careless.

The Benefits of Food Presentation
Have you ever heard the saying, “the eyes are the windows to the soul?” A deep phrase to say the least, it also lends some weight to the fact that the ways in which people visualize their surroundings can have a drastic effect on their mood and actions. In the simplest sense, inner peace can often arise from experiencing pure happiness. Sometimes, it is the little things like what we eat that can make this happen.

A beautifully designed entre can make eating all the more enjoyable. Catering companies work hard to make sure that the color, arrangement and portion of foods are all in harmony when preparing for events. Although it may seem absurd to conceive of food as anything more than an ingredient for survival, it is important to remember that most of us crave (and need) this simple pleasure in our lives. All in all, food presentation is a fun way to get the most out of what we eat.

Deciding to opt for a display rental over a custom made trade show exhibit is an important decision based on funds available. An equally important decision is about choosing the right presenter who can communicate well with show visitors. This presenter must be a shrewd tactician who can communicate well, understands your business and attracts the largest number of attendees through his presentation. All participants at a trade show have only one goal, to stand out in the crowd, attract the largest number of foot traffic and convert this into potential sales.

Hence the presenter is such a critical person. It does not matter if you have a technically knowledgeable person who understands all the nuances of your product. If that person cannot communicate the same to the attendees and capture their attention, visitors will not be interested in your trade show exhibits at all. Many companies who do not have such a qualified person can hire a presenter. Such a person must have skills like:

• Excellent communication skills
• Thorough understanding of the company’s products and services
• Awareness of the goals of the company
• Have the ability to engage the attention of visitors of all ages
• Keep the interest of visitors with a lively, interesting and informative presentation
• Be able to keep changing the presentation at least a few times so that it does not get monotonous

If you plan to hire a presenter, you must identify such a person a few days before the show. Communicate with them the message you want to display and provide him or her with complete details about your products and services. Also show them all the giveaways you have, walk them through all audio-visual presentations etc. The presenter must be on hand when the booth displays are being set up. This will give him an idea about where various items are. A seasoned presenter will have his own idea about some innovative ways to display items in a booth.

So, it is important for you to identify what the basic goal you have by attending a trade show. Will it be to educate people about your products and services or generate leads? Once you decide this, you can consider your various display options – audiovisual, interactive, games, quizzes etc. Small companies just entering the exhibition field will not have the budget to hire professional presenters. Oftentimes, the owner of the company will also double as a presenter at such shows.

Similarly, with a low budget, these startups prefer hiring a display rental rather than buying a full-fledged custom built booth display. Once the company starts to expand and the marketing budget grows, you can consider employing marketing personnel who can double as presenters at these exhibitions or if you prefer, you can hire a presenter who can provide a unique attraction at a show. You can even hire trade show presenters who will enact a Broadway or Vaudeville show.

These kinds of sideshows do not detract from the seriousness of your presentation. On the other hand, they educate and entertain. A sharp presenter will be able to engage the attention of the visitor at your booth, assess their interest in your product and slowly elicit critical information about a potential customer. A professional presenter can therefore double as a means to attract customers and also to market your product.

For example, if you choose to do a Broadway presentation, the presenter you hire will use actors, high tech screens etc., to make a presentation about your company’s products and services in a dazzling and entertaining manner. Such a show will take about 10 minutes to present and can take place about 3-4 times in an hour. Once the show is over, the presenter can request the audience to enter a draw that qualifies them for an instant discount for watching the show.

Now, some basic information about the customer can be noted to use as a follow-up by marketing staff of the company. A company that hires such a presenter will be looking for a solid return on investment. If the presenter delivers regularly, he or she will become well known and sought after by companies who participate regularly in trade shows.

The final execution for your design campaign or any design project that you’re doing should focus on quite a few things. You should focus on the layout structure itself, you need to make sure everything is in harmony and everything is balanced. You also need to focus on the major backgrounds that you have in your piece along with the large regions of the page. Afterwords you can start putting in all the necessary detail and information from the top of the layout to the bottom.

As you finish your project, you should always consult with your mentors and peers about the layout and the design in general. Most of the time they will like it and if any changes should be made they should always back it up with a reason behind it. Some changes you’ll make would be pure sacrifices, other changes will be improvements, but overall there would be a more positive outcome then the negative.

Just make sure that you stick to the requirements that were given to you at the start. If you think that you’re idea will look better then what was assignment then do the one that was assignment, and do an extra one for yourself. When you present the two pieces the client will see that you care about your work and might reconsider the changes and maybe even give you an extra tip.

The whole point of the execution is to put everything in the final piece that will be ready to present. There will be very little changes from the sketches that you’ve drawn to the final piece. Most of the time you might change some colors, or move a few things but generally speaking you’ll see a lot of similarities between the sketches that you’ve drawn and the final piece that you made.

They are undoubtedly amongst the best promotional tools today. That is why thousands of business employers as well as industrialists are nowadays inclining towards A4 folder printing at a very rapid pace. The logical fact is that custom and presentation holders are cutthroat marketing products which are capably designed by unique graphic design tools in style. Do you know about the most practical graphic design tools regarding your holder and stickers printing? If not, they are typically known as coral draw, adobe illustrator, dream weaver and Photoshop.

They are by and large printed via full color printing process. Do you know about the auxiliary methods? Well they are characteristically known as embossing, debossing, foil stamping, UV coating, gloss, and matte finish. Interestingly they are used in custom personalized business cards, cheap rack cards, full color greeting cards, custom paper CD sleeves and of course A4 presentation folder printing. Great news is that all of them are cutthroat marketing tools by any means. Therefore if you want to grab them, you will have to get connected with professional online printing giant so as to accomplish your desires in style.

In addition to custom pocket and presentation cases, you can surely make use of many other cost effective marketing tools for your longer business identity development for example vinyl stickers, print brochures, full color flyers, printed envelopes, barcode labels, and custom door hangers. Hence they are not only very efficient but also very cost effective promotional products which barely need you to pay few amount of dollar so as to get your desire accomplished in style. So don’t waste time anymore and buy A4 custom pocket folder so as to get your desires done on time.

Want to calm your nerves while speaking to an audience?

Do you know the easiest, simplest and most inspiring Soft Skill to use?

Focus on breathing more while serving each listener and marvel at the extra more power and believability you will have to inspire others into action!

Most everyone gets a bit nervous when speaking in front of an audience. There are many tricks and skills used by us professionals to calm our nerves, but by far the simplest, easiest and most inspiring is the simplest; just take an inspiring breath.

“Make every breath a joy”

My dear friend Don McFarland once said this and that little sentence changed my life. Now, how much fun do you dare to consciously have while breathing? More importantly, do you notice the effect?

Even though the word “inspire” comes from Latin and literally means to breathe in spirit, just taking in more air will help. Our voice is a physiological wind instrument. Just like a saxophone, flute or trumpet, it works more efficiently and sounds more inspiring when there is lots of air flowing through it.

Try this: Sit or stand up straight, take a few deep, relaxing and joyous breaths and before saying anything see how much more inspiring you feel. Starting from the top of your third deep breath, just easily say your name and the words, “I am inspiring”. How does that sound?

You may notice that more of you began to resonate with your message. Just like that wind instrument or a violin, more of the instrument (you) was vibrating with the tone of your message. Did you notice that the deeper and richer the tone of your voice becomes the more attractive and believable it sounds? Just this deeper and richer sound of your voice probably helped put you more at ease, but did you also notice that those deeper breaths also calmed you down?

Ask anyone what the most common way to relieve stress is and most will say, “take a deep breath”. Yet how often do we forget this sage advice when standing there, in front of an anxious crowd? If there is one thing you can easily do before, during and after you speak it is to consciously take a few more breaths. Those lovely little punctuation marks such as a period, question mark, comma and semi-colon are wonderful places where you can stop speaking and take in an extra joyous breath. In fact, you may be surprised to find that taking a relaxing pause to inhale two or three times while, for instance, asking a question or making a powerful point, may actually turn out to be fun.

Learning to breathe calmly and enjoyably while speaking in public may sound dull, but if it does then maybe you have yet to really take your first inspiring breath… And don’t forget, if you would rather not inspire your audience by breathing more, that’s OK.

There is another option that your audience may appreciate more.

Send them an E-mail.

Here’s to more inspiring and engaging presentations!

One of the biggest obstacles to becoming a master presenter is those butterflies that seem to be fluttering around in your stomach before you start to speak. Although you are an expert in your subject, your fears create a fight/flight reaction. Your hands become cold, your vital organs stop functioning properly, and a majority of your brain’s blood flow shifts to the ancient reactive defensive areas that reside just above your brain stem. Your mind and body begin shutting down. You are not your best. However, you can speak to small and large audiences in total comfort and excitement if you only understand what is really going on.

In the 1990′s a group of Italian neuroscientists discovered what they call mirror neurons. These brain cells, which are scattered throughout your brain, react when you observe the behaviors of others. This also happens when you sense the intentions of others. So as a speaker you are picking up on the anticipation and anxieties of your audience. Your mind becomes a dumping ground for their worries. Achieving a peak mental state prior to presenting starts when you realize that empathetic communication goes both ways.

Your audience wants to be transformed, entertained, and engaged. This happens when you establish a peak presenter state. By choosing two or three words to represent how you want the audience to perceive you and fully associating with these words, the mirror neurons located in their brains begin picking up your charisma. Example words include: humorous, witty, entertaining, knowledgeable, friendly, compassionate, effective, etc. If you receive a post-presentation evaluation, don’t be surprised if your feedback includes the words that you programmed into your mind. By the way, I also trigger this state by using a motivational phrase before I give my introduction. My favorite one is “Its show time!”

As an expert, you benefit your audience by presenting at your best. Once you understand how easy it is to get into a master presenter state, you’ll forget that you ever experienced anything else. This is the subject of my Speak Publically like a Pro hypnosis CD and MP3 session.

To have a quality puppet presentation, there are many things you should do; proper entrances and exits, good lip synchronization, maintain good eye contact, and others. There are also some things you should try to avoid. This article presents three of them.

The Dreaded Quicksand Patches

We recently began training some new puppeteers and one of the first things they realized was that it takes work to keep a puppet up in the air for 3 or 4 minutes. Their arms were sore after their first 3 minute routine and even more so after the second and third. One of the keys during your practice time is to work on conditioning the puppeteer’s arms so they can hold them at a consistent height for several minutes at a time. The second key is to make sure they concentrate on their puppet as much as possible. If these two keys are missing, you’ll run into quicksand patches in your theater where the puppet slowly sinks until just the top of the head is showing.

If the puppeteer’s arm tires quickly they’ll begin to lose focus on the puppet and just try to make it through the presentation. Without the right concentration, they begin to relax their arm which causes the puppet to sink. When that happens, the audience begins to wonder how far down it’ll go or they’ll silently urge it to come back up. Either way, they’re focused on a puppet and not the message.

If you find yourself in this situation, don’t just pop the puppet up because that’ll draw attention to it. Slowly raise it up to the proper height and continue the play.

Ventriloquist Puppets

A ventriloquist is someone who speaks without moving his lips to give the illusion that the voice is coming from somewhere else. A ventriloquist puppet is one that doesn’t move his mouth, but the words still come out anyway. Puppets shouldn’t work on their ventriloquism skills during a puppet play.

This happens for a couple of reasons. Most often it’s from a lack of focus. If you’re doing a pre-recorded play and let your mind wander, you can miss lines. It can also happen if you’re focused on helping someone else with their lines and miss your own. If you’re doing a live play, it can happen from too much concentration. If you don’t know the script well enough, you have to concentrate even more on the page so you don’t miss a line. Sometimes, in that instance, you may say the words with your mouth, but forget to move the puppet’s mouth.

Exposed Human Arms and Hands

Human arm puppets are good to use and see, but the audience shouldn’t see an actual human arm or hand. If you raise your puppet too high, the audience can see its bottom edge and your arm which ruins the illusion of lifelikeness that you want to maintain. When using the arm rods, be careful that you don’t raise your hand over the top of the theater. When adult members of the audience see an arm or hand, they’ll politely overlook it, but you can’t count on that with children. If one sees it, you can safely assume that they’ll point it out to their friends next to them and will miss out on what the puppet is saying at that point.

During practices continue to focus on what each puppeteer should do to maintain quality in your programs, but don’t overlook these three things they shouldn’t do.

Someone in a recent presentation skills training program asked, “How do I project my voice and also, project authority?”

It’s a great question because your voice is an important part of your presentation and should communicate that you’re confident, knowledgeable and engaging.

Here are 7 tips for projecting authority using your voice:

1. Breathe

In order to project your voice, breathing is crucial. The more that you can breathe deeply and support the breath from your core and diaphragm — as opposed to taking shallow breaths from your chest – the more you can support your voice and project it.

2. Don’t shout

Shouting can offend your audience and leave you with a sore throat, laryngitis or vocal cord damage. Projecting your voice means supporting it with breath from your diaphragm and core so

that your voice sounds strong and supported rather than high-pitched and breathy.

3. Use a microphone

Used correctly, a microphone make it easier for the audience to hear and understand you, even while you are speaking at your normal volume. Practice using it so you will be comfortable with it in front of an audience.

4. If presenting over the phone, avoid the speakerphone

A speakerphone will pick up all the background noise in the room and make it harder for the audience to hear you clearly. Use a headset or hand-held phone rather than a speakerphone, if possible, so it can easily pick up your voice without you having to shout.

5. Stand up

If you stand up, you automatically have better posture and it’s easier to breathe fully and project your voice. You sound more awake and energized and are less likely to slouch and cut off your air supply.

6. Eliminate “ums” and “ahs”

If you have a lot of “ums,” “ahs” and pause words, you don’t sound authoritative – you sound tentative and unsure. Eliminating those pause words will help you sound like you know what you’re talking about.

7. Avoid “uptalk”

“Uptalk” is when you voice goes up at the end of every sentence, so every sentence sounds like a question, as in, “Welcome? My name is Beth? I will present the third-quarter results to you?” Uptalk makes you sound hesitant and timid. Be mindful of how you speak, and particularly how you end sentences. End with your voice pitch staying the same or going down slightly, so the audience knows you are making a statement rather than asking a question.

If you follow these 7 tips, you will make able to use your voice to project authority so your audience will listen to what you have to say.

Proposing any sort of idea or invention can be a very difficult task to prepare for. You will obviously have to have all of your information together in an orderly and easy-to-understand fashion, but simply explaining your proposal is often times not enough. If you are currently working on making a presentation to show to potential angel investors or even colleagues at the office, you will almost certainly have to use some sort of visual aid or representation to keep things interesting and make sure that everyone understands exactly what it is you are trying to convey.

Any presentation visual you bring with you does not have to look expensive at all, but it certainly should not look as if it was poorly made or neglected in any way. You want the people you are talking with to feel that you have already put a substantial amount of work into preparing the project: this way everyone will be more likely to trust your judgments and will give you much more leeway when it comes to projected numbers or estimates. We all know that nobody is right all the time, but you can certainly make it seem like you are most of the time by showing that you took every possible measure to study and research before your presentation. If you don’t yet have a clear idea exactly how your idea will be financially profitable or how it will work, then you very likely have much more work to do before you are ready for your presentation.

The main purpose of any visual is to excite and better inform the audience. If a visual fails to provide the viewer with some sort of assistance in understanding the concepts at hand, then it will very likely be unnecessary. Extravagant presentations might impress certain people, but you don’t want to give off the impression that you are trying to create with your words rather than explain a serious possibility. If you have a limited budget, preparing your own graphs or charts using computer software that is designed to do exactly that can act as a inexpensive alternative to paying for professional presentation visual creation.

You can never rely solely on the visual representations that you create or pay to be created to fully explain your idea. You will have to work on your speech, written content, positive social interactions and many other essential ingredients to a successful presentation if you hope to truly impress your audience.

Both in work and out of work, we are often asked to deliver presentations. We often spend many hours carefully crafting slides without a thought about what the other party wants out of the presentation. All we think about is the message we want to get across.

The first question that we need to ask ourselves before sitting down with Powerpoint or Keynote and typing up some slides is do we actually need a presentation? Sometimes a presentation may not be the best way to get your message across. Maybe a meeting or a memo might be a better way.

But, if you actually need to give a presentation, and a meeting, memo or email won’t do, then you can improve your presentations by using the WOMBAT Technique.

> W – Who are the audience, what do they want, what motivates them?

> O – Objectives why are you speaking?

> M – Material – think about who and what material is most likely to get the message across

> B – Brainstorm ideas and then rank the ideas as Essential, Desirable and Filler. Only include the essential in the presentation. Keep re-ranking until you’re left with 1-2 points you want to make.

> A – Arrange into 5 logical parts 1) Opening 2) Introduction 3) Mainbody 4) Conclusion 5) Close

> T – Test Test it out!!

Most people forget the last bit, but Testing it out even in front of the mirror, will ensure that you presentation is more memorable and gets our message across most effectively.