(30 January 2026)
A day trip to London this week to run a commsy sort of workshop with a government team. I tried out an exercise I’ve been wanting to try out for years: I display a very text-heavy slide, typical of the sort we see in government all the time, and at the same time, I play a short audio clip.
The aim: to briefly replicate and recreate the typical “presenting” conditions we all encounter all the time, where someone is showing lots of words on screen, while saying lots of different words with their mouth.
As soon as the audio clip was finished (it was only 47 seconds long), I moved on to the next slide - where I had a surprise quiz, of 3 questions about details that had been visible on the previous slide.
No-one in the group could answer any of the questions.
Why? Because their attention had been split in half - trying to read the slide, while trying to listen to the audio clip. And mostly failing to read the slide, because the audio clip was more interesting.
I was very pleased with this whole exercise because it worked exactly as intended, and made the point I wanted to make. It showed why text-heavy slides fail in front of an audience.
I’ll be using that trick again, pretty sure of that.
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Talking of quizzes:
If you happen to live around my neck of the woods (West Wilts / Bath / Bristol), and you’re looking for an entertaining night out, and you like helping good causes — get a ticket for the Focus Counselling Annual Quiz, where I shall be the quizmaster.
7pm, 13 Feb, in Bath, at Prior Park College
Brain-bending questions, tongue-tingling nosh, and limb-loosening booze if you want it, all for 15 of your Earth pounds, and all in a very good cause. Focus provides counselling and mental health support at affordable prices, and it completely depends on donations and fundraising. Also, quizzes are fun.
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At the urging of several friends, I’ve been playing with AI tools for things other than writing. I tried asking Lovable to build a simple web synthesizer for me - don’t make it like GarageBand, I said. Make it simpler, with a play/pause button and some sliders that change the sound along various axes, such as “Eno <> Charlie XCX” and “Art <> Pop” etc. The results (see screenshot above) were… not good. I appreciate that perhaps they’d improve with more effort on my part, with better prompts, and with me having a clearer idea of what it is I want. But first impressions were that Lovable is not much of a musician.
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I like Loadmore, a collection of unusual web designs for mobile devices. Poking around the portfolio category, I found Kim Wernes, and Narrow Design. Lovely.
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giles (at) gilest.org
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