The spoof: Paul Scheer’s (faux) TED Talk
Created by: Team Coco
The lesson: Don’t fall victim to idea sprawl.

Paul Scheer loads up his talk with insights on everything from dreams to the appropriate dipping sauce for chicken wings. But wouldn’t it have been more effective if he’d shared one single, cohesive idea? This is what we tell speakers: Consider the idea you want to share with the world. And include only the essentials to pop that idea into focus.

The spoof: Onion Talks: Compost-Fueled Cars: Wouldn’t That Be Great?
Created by: The Onion
The lesson: Don’t share an idea you don’t believe in enough to follow through on.

In the inaugural episode of The Onion’s spoof series, a man shares an idea for cars that run on compost as if it were gas. Intriguing. Only, he says, “Feasibility deals with implementation—and I’m not involved with that.” This … isn’t good. When it comes to your big idea, you have to walk the walk as much as you talk the talk.

The spoof: Onion Talks: Ducks Go Quack, Chickens Go Cluck
Created by: The Onion
The lesson: Don’t bother sharing an idea that isn’t new.

Here, a man gives a talk about the noises made by your favorite barnyard animals. And while his Old MacDonald presentation style is compelling, his substance is nil. We look for ideas that surprise and change perceptions — whether it’s a talk that flips your thinking on a scientific phenomenon or one that makes you see something subtly different in your relationships.

The spoof: DED Talk: A TED Talk for Zombies
Created by: Official Comedy
The lesson: Beware of taking too sharp a left turn in your talk … and, please, only kill metaphorically.

This zombie’s talk is almost standing O–worthy. And then — there’s a twist that goes horribly wrong. While surprising talks are great, nothing should ever go this fully off the rails. A good talk takes the audience on a journey step by step. Also, literally killing the audience? Well, that’s no way to make sure your idea spreads. (That note also goes out to the speaker of Onion Talks: Stabbing Ignorance With Glass Ceiling Shards.)

The spoof: Patton Oswalt’s (fake) TED Talk
Created by: Team Coco
The lesson: Don’t let stern faces in the audience get you down.

At 1:08 in this talk, Patton Oswalt gets into a brawl with an audience member. Why? Because the guy in the audience had a sour expression on his face. The truth of talking to a big audience: not everyone will be engaged. So why focus on them? Instead, talk to the people who are clearly with you. Find a few friendly-looking people in different parts of the audience and speak to them as if they were old friends.

The spoof: Onion Talks: A Future Where All Robots Have Penises
Created by: Onion Talks
The lesson: Don’t rely on your demo.

This speaker shares the strange idea that household robots would catch on only if they had realistic genitalia; his talk goes all to hell when his robot malfunctions and falls off the stage onto an audience member. Of course, robots, animals, flying machines — they’re all a little unpredictable. So if your talk includes a demo, make sure you lay out the framework of your idea enough that you’re not fully betting on the unknown.

The spoof: High TED Talks
Created by: College Humor
The lesson: Neither mind-altering substance, nor the munchies, will help you feel more prepared to give your talk.

It’s completely natural to be nervous before speaking in public. (Watch the TED-Ed lesson “The Science of Stage Fright” to see how it isn’t so much a mental challenge to be overcome, as a physical reaction to be adapted to.) But walking onstage drunk or high, or overeating from the snack table backstage, is not how you conquer your nerves. The only way to fight the feeling: practice, practice, practice. Know your talk forwards and backwards to the point where the flow of words becomes second nature.

The spoof: Very Mary-Kate: SoHobo

Created by: College Humor
The lesson: Don’t do that thing where a bulleted list appears on your slides just as you say the very same words.

During a talk, the audience processes what they see on a slide and what they’re hearing in two separate channels. So if you type it in your slide, people aren’t fully paying attention when you say it. In general, we ask speakers to use as little text as possible on their slides, and to be especially wary of unnecessary bulleted lists. Our motto, which I just made up: Say it, don’t display it. (A sub-lesson for this spoof: Don’t steal ideas from Zoolander. As hilarious as this video is, “SoHobo” reminds us a bit of Derelicte.)

The spoof: Onion Talks: Loudness Equals Power
Created by: The Onion
The lessons: Don’t yell, and definitely don’t over-promise.

Every now and then, a speaker strides on the stage and uses a forceful tone that leaves the audience … disconcerted. The reason for the microphone: so you can talk normally, as if you’re having an engaged conversation with a friend. But this talk hits a bigger speed-bump when the speaker says of his invention, “In a few years, there’s no question [it] will transform our lives.” This kind of big promise just raises skepticism and smacks of inauthenticity. Keep promises realistic. Always.

Some other what-not-to-dos represented in these spoofs: don’t whisper, don’t nervously pace, watch the “jazz hands,” and don’t cling to your props for dear life. Don’t talk about your talk, introduce too much specialized vocabulary, fail to admit controversy, or paint a picture that’s either too utopian or too dystopian. And of course: Don’t offer up purely anecdotal evidence. You can read many more speaker tips in our comprehensive TEDx Speaker Guide (PDF).

1. Think about your slides last. Building your slides should be the tail end of developing your presentation. Think about your main message, structure its supporting points, practice it and time it—and then start thinking about your slides. The presentation needs to stand on its own; the slides are just something you layer over it to enhance the listener experience. Too often, I see slide decks that feel more like presenter notes, but I think it’s far more effective when the slides are for the audience to give them a visual experience that adds to the words.
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2. Create a consistent look and feel. In a good slide deck, each slide feels like part of the same story. That means using the same or related typography, colors and imagery across all your slides. Using pre-built master slides can be a good way to do that, but it can feel restrictive and lead to me-too decks. I like to create a few slides to hold sample graphic elements and type, then copy what I need from those slides as I go.
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3. Think about topic transitions. It can be easy to go too far in the direction of consistency, though. You don’t want each slide to look exactly the same. I like to create one style for the slides that are the meat of what I’m saying, and then another style for the transitions between topics. For example, if my general slides have a dark background with light text, I’ll try transition slides that have a light background with dark text. That way they feel like part of the same family, but the presentation has texture—and the audience gets a visual cue that we’re moving onto a new topic.
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4. With text, less is almost always more. One thing to avoid—slides with a lot of text, especially if it’s a repeat of what you’re saying out loud. It’s like if you give a paper handout in a meeting—everyone’s head goes down and they read, rather than staying heads-up and listening. If there are a lot of words on your slide, you’re asking your audience to split their attention between what they’re reading and what they’re hearing. That’s really hard for a brain to do, and it compromises the effectiveness of both your slide text and your spoken words. If you can’t avoid having text-y slides, try to progressively reveal text (like unveiling bullet points one by one) as you need it.
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5. Use photos that enhance meaning. I love using simple, punchy photos in presentations, because they help what you’re saying resonate in your audience’s mind without pulling their attention from your spoken words. Look for photos that (1) speak strongly to the concept you’re talking about and (2) aren’t compositionally complex. Your photo could be a metaphor or something more literal, but it should be clear why the audience is looking at it, and why it’s paired with what you’re saying. For example, I recently used the image above—a photo of a container ship about to tip over (it eventually sank)—to lead off a co-worker’s deck about failure preparation. And below is another example of a photo I used in a deck to talk about the launch of the new TED.com. The point I was making was that a launch isn’t the end of a project—it’s the beginning of something new. We’ll learn, adapt, change and grow.

And now some tactical tips…

1. Go easy on the effects and transitions. Keynote and Powerpoint come with a lot of effects and transitions. In my opinion, most of these don’t do much to enhance the audience experience. At worst, they subtly suggest that the content of your slides is so uninteresting that a page flip or droplet transition will snap the audience out of their lethargy. If you must use them, use the most subtle ones, and keep it consistent.
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2. Use masking to direct attention in images. If you want to point something out in a photo, you could use a big arrow. Or you could do what I call a dupe-and-mask. I do this a lot when showing new page designs, particularly when I don’t want the audience to see the whole design until I’m finished talking about individual components of it. Here’s the original image.Here’s the process for masking it. (1) Set the image transparency to something less than 100. (2) Duplicate that image so there is one directly over the top of the other. (3) Set the dup’d image transparency back to 100. and (4) Follow the technique here to mask the dup’d image. You’ll end up with something that looks like this.
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4. You can use this technique to call out anything you want in a screenshot. A single word, a photo, a section of content—whatever you want your audience to focus on.
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5. Try panning large images. Often, I want to show screen shot of an entire web page in my presentations. There’s a great Chrome extension to capture these—but these images are oftentimes much longer than the canvas size of the presentation. Rather than scaling the image to an illegible size, or cropping it, you can pan it vertically as you talk about it. In Keynote, this is done with a Move effect, which you can apply from an object’s action panel.
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6. For video, don’t use autoplay. It’s super easy to insert video in Keynote and Powerpoint—you just drag a Quicktime file onto the slide. And when you advance the deck to the slide with the video that autoplays, sometimes it can take a moment for the machine to actually start playing it. So often I’ve seen presenters click again in an attempt to start the video during this delay, causing the deck to go to the next slide. Instead, set the video to click to play. That way you have more predictable control over the video start time, and even select a poster frame to show before starting.
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7. Reproduce simple charts and graphs. Dropping an image of a chart into a presentation is fine, but it almost always disrupts the feel of a deck in unsightly fashion. If the graph data is simple enough (and you have some extra time) there’s a way to make it much more easy on the eyes. You could redraw it in the native presentation application. That sounds like needless work, and it might be for your purposes, but it can really make your presentation feel consistent and thought-through, of one flavor from soup to nuts. You’ll have control over colors, typography, and more. Here are some examples.
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Lastly, I’d love to leave you with a couple book recommendations. The first is Resonate, by Nancy Duarte. It’s not so much about slides, but about public speaking in general – which is the foundation for any presentation, regardless of how great your slides are. In it, she breaks down the anatomy of what makes a great presentation, how to establish a central message and structure your talk, and more. (One of her case studies comes from Benjamin Zander’s charming TED Talk about classical music, a talk that captivated the audience from start to finish.) Think of this as prerequisite reading for my second recommendation, also by Duarte: Slide:ology. This is more focused on presentation visuals and slides.

Now, compare that to the same excerpt edited competently.

What made the first excerpt so uncomfortable to watch was that the edits were unmotivated; every edit was random. Here are ten tips for making meaningful edits:

1. Choose the best camera angles for each moment. As you look at your footage, your goal is to balance speaker intent with the expectations of the web audience. Think about where the audience would want to be looking at different points during the talk if they were in the room — that will help you select the best camera angle to reconstruct each moment. By thinking about that, you are also choosing angles that help the speaker better express his or her story.

2. Use more close-ups and medium shots than wide shots. It’s important to cut between different camera angles so that the audience understands the space where the TED Talk took place. But once the talk is contextualized, close-ups and medium shots hold the most meaning for the audience. It’s engaging to watch speakers’ facial expressions and body language as they speak and, with a closer view, you can just see it better.

3. Watch a speaker’s body language and pay attention to the way they talk. Language is embodied. A speakers’ thoughts, words and breath are all revealed through their body language. Meanwhile, each speaker has a unique rhythm and cadence to their voice. If you pay attention to these things, it will provide a natural rhythm for your editing and it will all feel intuitive for the audience, too.

4. Cut on action. One way to make the edit between two shots seem invisible is by cutting on a gesture. The viewer watches the beginning of a motion that begins in one shot and follows it as it crosses the edit and finishes in the next shot. The completion of the gesture masks the edit. Here is an example of a cut made on the subtle gesture made as the speaker completes his thought and begins a new one.

5. Cut on words. The sound of a word, especially if it contains a hard consonant, can make an edit feel less obvious. When the word is one that is relevant to the main point of the speaker’s talk, the edit can also highlight that word and make it more memorable. Let’s listen to example of an edit cut on a word.

6. Keep things moving. The web audience has a short attention span. Framing a speaker’s words with multiple camera angles is more dynamic and interesting than holding on one camera angle for a long period of time.

7. Break up graphics. At TED, the slides that speakers use often stay on-screen for quite a while. We try to break the slide up into sections, so that only the relevant parts of the slide are revealed in time with the speaker’s words. This may or may not help in your own editing, but the point is: be methodical with directing attention.

8. Edit out mistakes. At TED, we do edit out both technical errors and speaker errors. We often mask these edits by cutting on action. Let’s take a look at an example of how this is done. First you will hear two sentences that are hooked together by an “um,” something many speakers do without realizing it.

Now the “um” is edited out, by cutting between two shots during an action-filled moment.

9. Think about who’s speaking and who’s listening. One challenge we sometimes get in the TED editing room: interviews. To explain the best approach to editing one, let’s watch a short excerpt from an interview Chris Anderson did with Bill Gates. In this example, only one camera angle is used.

Now let’s watch the same excerpt edited like a TED Talk.

The edits are motivated by the words spoken by both Chris and Bill. This works, but a better way to edit this interview would be to reframe Chris’ words with shots of Bill listening. Watch the same excerpt edited with footage of Bill Gates listening.

All of a sudden, the point of view of the interview shifts. Because the purpose of the interview is to give the audience an opportunity to know more about Bill Gates, watching the interview from Bill’s perspective is just more interesting.

10.  Take some space from your edit. After spending some time with the same edit, it’s easy to become desensitized to the material. So it’s important to step away. Taking a break from an edit and returning with fresh eyes can help you maintain your sense of audience and help you do your best work.

Hope that these tips have been helpful. One thing I often think about when it comes to editing TED Talks: The Internet is still very young and doesn’t yet have its own, unique vocabulary for video editing … but one day it will. As new technologies introduce new models for telling stories, and audience expectations shift as a result, the way TED Talks are filmed and edited will change. It’s fun to imagine what the TED Talk of the future might look like.

For random life stuff…

Dark Sky
A weather app with startling accuracy, its interface tells you things like: “Light rain starting in 22 minutes.” It also shows you beautiful weather maps that let you play local-news weather expert. “It’s like a wizard,” says our CTO, Gavin Hall. “If this app were available in the 1600s, it would have been burned at the stake for witchcraft.”

*Sunrise
Like your Google Calendar with key improvements, several staffers swear by this app. It offers shortcuts for adding events, and also bakes things like weather reports and Facebook birthday reminders into the mix of your daily calendar.  “It’s awesome,” says IT Manager Francil Richards.

*KeyMe
Communications manager Samantha Kelly was excited to download this app, as she recently got locked out of her apartment. She says, “You scan your keys by taking a photo of them and then you have ‘digital copies.’” With the copy, you can get a key made for you at a KeyMe kiosk (they currently have five in New York) or through the mail. Fingerprint scan is required.

*Think Dirty
This app tells you exactly what’s in the personal care product you’re about to buy. You scan the barcode, and it shares information about potentially harmful ingredients (and gives alternatives, if you want them). It’s useful for fact-checking label claims like “all-natural” and “organic.” Kyle Shearer of our Events Workgroup says, “It helps me make informed choices on products that I am bringing home.”

Yoga Studio
Yoga Studio reminds us of the “Surprise Me” feature on the TED app. You pick the kind of yoga class you want (strength, flexibility, relaxation), your level (beginner, intermediate or advanced) and the amount of time you have (20 minutes, 40 minutes or longer) and it creates a class for you. “Whenever I am traveling or too busy to exercise, I sneak in a lesson,” says Product Development Manager Jai Punjabi.

*Pocket
One of those apps on this list that you may already know about, it lets you save blog posts and articles to read when you’re offline. TEDx Digital Strategist Alex Rudloff says, “I’m able to keep track of all the articles that get sent my way. In this post-Google Reader world, it’s my primary way of keeping up on things.” Community Support Manager Mireille Pilloud adds, “They send out a weekly email I like that shows the most-Pocketed articles and suggests articles for me based on what I generally read.” Another feature that gets big ups from our staff—the fact that you can set the font size because it strips out the content’s original formatting.

*VSCO Cam
It doesn’t have a name that rolls of the tongue, but this app is great for helping turn ho-hum snapshots into arty photographs. Janet Lee of our Distribution team says, “A year ago, I was scanning my Instagram feed and noticed a lot of ‘moodier’ photos. The beauty of this app is that it doesn’t matter how bad your framing is, you can just wash it out. It’s maximum likes on instagram, with low effort.”

*Camera360
This app has more than 200 photo filters and 10 modes. But the real benefit, says Executive Producer of TED Media June Cohen, is that images are for your eyes only. “I like Camera360 for creating Instagram-like photos I don’t want to share publicly,” she says.

For staying organized…

*Wunderlist
An app that lets you create shareable lists of favorites—be they restaurants, sites in a city, or movies. But it’s better known for its shareable to-do lists. “It organizes my life,” says Anjali Mohan of our Client Services Workgroup. “I use it at work and at home. My husband gets reminders from the app when he needs to clean.” Production Manager Kristel Ottis also swears by this app. “There’s simply no other way I could keep track of all the nitty-gritty details that go into each production,” she says.

MeMail
This app does one thing really well—you can send yourself an email in two taps, for quick reminders or ideas you don’t want to forget. “It’s helped me get rid of all the fiddly bits of paper in my pocket,” says Product Development Associate Bedirhan Cinar.

*Trello
A slightly more visual rendering of your to-dos, this app allows you to create boards for different projects and separate sharable lists within them. Each task goes on a separate card. “I’ve tried tons of task apps, and Trello is by far my favorite,” says Social Media Editor Nadia Goodman. “I love how easy it is to customize, color code, and rearrange things. It’s also really easy to make collaborative boards and store information — like files, notes or images — within a task. My one complaint is that I wish it would ping me when a due date is coming up!”

*nvALT
A spin-off of Notational Velocity, this app is popular with techy types because it includes MultiMarkdown functionality. Front-End Developer Joe Bartlett explains, “I’m naturally scatterbrained and love nvALT for storing and indexing the sorts of details I used to jot down haphazardly and forget: conference notes, obscure math and command line tricks, what cartridge the printer takes,” he says. “It adds extra customization options.”

*Todoist
Like both Wunderlist and Trello, this to-do list helper has both an app and a web client that communicate. “I found this in my never-ending search for the perfect task management app,” says Product Development Associate Will True. “This isn’t necessarily it, but it provides simple task organization—by project, category, priority, due date. It’s not fancy, which is honestly why I like it. It also has great APIs so I can hook other things or build my own little tools on the data it provides.”

*Check
This app keeps track of all your bills and when they are due, and also monitors your bank and credit card accounts. Most importantly, it tells you when there’s a mismatch between the two — i.e. when you’re about to get charged an overdraft fee — so you can fix the problem. “It’s way better than Mint,” says IT Manager Francil Richards. “It means I’m never late on payments.”

*Evernote
Evernote is an organizational tool that you can use as a storing place for short notes, or as a place to collect all your thoughts—links, photos, notes, checklists—for larger projects. “Evernote is awesome because it’s versatile,” says Junior Designer Lilian Chen. “You can use it for storing receipts and outlining travel plans and meeting notes.”

For getting around…

CityMaps2Go Pro
This app downloads offline, zoomable, searchable maps of major cities, so that even if you are roaming around Tokyo and can’t read any of the signs, you can still find your way around. “It’s good for people like me who travel internationally, but don’t like to get data plans,” says Thu-Huong Ha, of our editorial team.

*Word Lens
Another great app for travelers, Word Lens visually translates printed text into your language in real time. When you snap a photo of a sign or document, it shows the image to you in English. “It’s crazy,” says Kyle Shearer of our Events Workgroup. “The translations are not always 100%, but it’s good enough to get by on.” Hello, food menus.

*Moves
Moves tracks every step you take, which sounds creepy, but is actually useful. “It quantifies how many miles you’ve walked, cycled and run,” says Patrick D’Arcy, of the TED Fellows team. “It’s not about the calories burned for me, but the ability visualize where I’ve gone on a map. A friend actually introduced me to the app when he came back from Mexico City and he was able to show me the exact routes he took.”

*Waze
An app to help you get stuck in traffic as infrequently as possible. Drivers share real-time traffic delays—accidents, traffic jams, and the like—so that you can avoid them. The head of our Media Team, June Cohen, once mentioned this app a staff meeting, and lots of us are using it now.

*Roadify
This app gives you real-time data on transit info in 50 cities in the US and Canada. “I know when the next bus or train is coming and, if it’s not there, the reason for the delay,” says Anna Verghese, Deputy Director of the TED Prize. “Psychologically, I like knowing when I reach the subway station that the train is four minutes away, so that I don’t have to hurl myself down the subway stairs.”

Exit Strategy
This app is for New Yorkers only. (Sorry.) It helps you plan your subway route, down to where to stand on the platform, and which exit to use to get to your destination in the quickest amount of time. “It speaks to my need for efficiency,” says producer Roxanne Lash.

Embark
Other staffers also recommend Embark, which is a route-planning app akin to Hop Stop that integrates information about delays. It’s available in 10 cities and has a big bonus: it works underground, without connection.

*Couch to 5k
“This app trains you to run a 5k. It gives you audio alerts when to start running/walking,” says Accountant Erline Maruhom. “The idea is that you should be able to run a 5k in nine weeks. We’ll see … I’m hopeful.”

For computer and email ease…

*Boomerang
This is app for Gmail that is majorly handy. It lets you set a notification to pop up if you haven’t gotten a reply on an email within a specified amount of time. It also lets you boomerang messages back to the top of your inbox, closer to when you actually need to pay attention. But the feature our staff members love: you can schedule emails to send later. “I tend to write emails in bulk at night or on the weekend—but don’t want to bug anyone then,” says writer Kate Torgovnick May. “It’s nice to be able to schedule an email for a more appropriate time and hit send.”

*Mailbox
This app helps you archive and trash email—or put off emails you don’t have to respond to immediately until a later date—with a left or right swipe. It also shows whole conversations with a cool interface that looks a lot like a chat. “On the train into work, I can quickly sift through all the emails and start my day with a clearer head,” says Post Production Manager Gwen Schroeder.

*Authy
This app disconnects 2-step authentication from text messaging, and does it in a way that’s a little more secure, should your phone fall into the wrong hands. “This is especially handy for when I’m in areas with no reception or am international and don’t have a texting plan,” says Product Development Associate Bedirhan Cinar. “Google offers an identical app, but I like Authy better because you can password protect it so if someone has your phone, they can’t easily access your 2 step codes.”

*Quicksilver
“It lets you search, find and open applications and files on your Mac quickly using shortcut keys,” says TEDx Branding Coordinator Boian Filev. “It has really sped up finding and opening files that might be buried deep in folders.”

*Flux
This app rocks for anyone who has eyes that are sensitive to the bright light of a computer screen. It makes your computer or iOS device display adjust to the time of the day, and get warmer and dimmer at night. “It keeps me from getting a headache in the evening,” says writer Kate Torgovnick May. “I also appreciate it at TED Conferences, when we can sometimes end up being in a dark theater all day. It’s nice to get some demarcation of what time it is outside.”