I Gave My First Public Lecture Style Talk & I Didn’t Puke.
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Skip the story and view the lecture HERE
Regaining confidence is such a tricky but equally interesting self act.
It's like I believed in myself before.
People know me for believing in myself.
Yet here I am again, climbing a mountain I once conquered…
but the ridges have changed.
In grade school I used to love getting up in front of the class to present my projects. I always wanted to go first because I believed so confidently in the work that I had prepared. I enjoyed the moments spent at the kitchen table hot gluing my heart away, and it gave me great pleasure to share those tangible items with my classmates, in hopes of an A+ to validate my efforts.
Then I got older, and grades stopped being the metric of my artistic success. So I turned to the internet.
Empty criticisms infiltrate my notification box just as much as genuine support. Ultimately overstimulating me. Leaving the empty voices in my head to often look to the algorithm for advice on how I should use my voice and present my work.
Stripping me of that raw trust I had in myself to share my personal experiences & perspective to contribute to a given topic.
I haven’t quite mastered the balance of tapping back into my inner child, while also embracing my newfound womanhood. But I do believe that this platform, Soular Lab, has helped me to start and work in pursuit of it.
From mood boarding and photoshoots, to design projects and poetry. Recapping it all through these personal essays, this platform has helped me to showcase and broaden my artistic perspective. It has also helped me to continuously exercise and strengthen my creative muscle.
In this practice I have formulated my own unique methodology to the creative process, and at the end of March I got the opportunity to deliver a talk through NC State University Libraries, Making Space Event Series.
1. INITIATION
This journey technically began May 2023, but It wasn’t until December that I truly began putting the pieces together. In between that time my focus was divided between graduating, relocating, and working a full time job. The only thing I had accomplished for this project before December was the title and a brief description of what I would talk about.
I was given complete freedom to choose my topic and how it would be presented. Titled Explore, Document, Reflect: Leveraging Experiences For The Creative Process, I immediately knew that I wanted my talk to center Soular Lab, because a lot of people who know me and/or my work are not familiar with this platform or they don’t understand how it works within my universe. And because of this I get many questions about what I do/how I do it.
I’m sure those questions will never stop, but I thought this would be a great way to provide in-depth answers about my journey + continue sharing the platform with new people & open up the conversation about creativity.
Plus down the road I see this digital laboratory/blog becoming a physical space, so why not cultivate that in ways that are accessible to me now?
I knew that it would be lecture style, because:
1. I have so much that I want to say as it relates to creativity
2. I am manifesting a Ted Talk
3. I thought it would be fun to cosplay a professor for the day.
2. PROJECT COMMENCEMENT
This led me to begin my preparation. I gathered prior materials that I could potentially use as points to drive the talk, and then began my research by looking into what makes a good lecture. I thought that if I could craft a strong skeleton, then I could drop my previous findings into potential categories to sort through, and connect the dots later.
Before this talk I never spoke in depth about the EDR Method. Explore, Document, Reflect served solely as “departments” of the lab, and even then I’ve never directly spoken about how these 3 words are informing my creative process. The full concept lived in my head & it was time to organize my thoughts and articulate them.
I found that like any academic paper, I would need an intro, body, and outro. (I don’t know why I thought it would be so much more complicated)
Context is used to provide a background and explain the relevance and connections with other learning.
Content is used to augment the readings to help students draw connections and alternative explanations.
Closure helps students to summarize the lecture, reinforces the learning outcomes, and contextualizes upcoming topics as students prepare for the next class.
Working backwards with the help of these three points, I was able to then create my objectives for the talk.
The goal of the talk was to:
Empower attendees to leverage their creativity no matter their respective field of study
Enlighten attendees on the Creative Process through the lens of some of my favorite creators
Encourage attendees to formulate their own recipe for the creative process with the help of the EDR Method.
From these objectives I split the body of the lecture into 3 parts:
Democratizing Creativity
The Creative Process
EDR Method
I then sorted prior material I’ve consumed that I believed to be important contributions to my realization about the creative process + support one of the three objectives.
These materials included, articles, books, educational videos, quotes from people I admire, and even a Solange Interlude. (I won’t go into detail about how they were utilized, you’ll have to watch the lecture to see)
3. SOCIAL PROMOTION
While working on the contents of the lecture, I also crafted the visual aesthetic of the social rollout. There was a ton of overlap in the talk preparation and the promotion planning. Partially because as time winded down I knew that if I was going to give my attendees the experience I envisioned I would have to multitask. I am often so backed up on projects that I am left with limited time to promote, but I didn’t want this to be one of those times. So I planned to have a little under a full month to promote the talk on my social channels.
I kicked off my social rollout planning with a mood board. (duh!)
I have multiple running moodboards that speak to the visual directions that I can take Soular Lab in. From those boards I made a separate board specifically for the talk. From that board I chose 6 photos + a photo from my personal archive to pin to my private project board that I made to keep track of my progress. I found that focusing on a few photos selected from the larger pools helps me to easily combine ideas to better articulate exactly what I am trying to convey.
To me these photos are a blend of the professional NYC Journalist who is serious about their investigative work, combined with the quirky maximalist curious teen whose passions are clear from the clothing they wear to the conversations they have.
I threw in the photo of my nephew watching the car being worked on because it served as a perfect representation of taking an authentic experience and leveraging it later in the future.
From there I asked myself, “How could I make this feel fresh & new, unite these aesthetics without it feeling too overt, while still considering my existing Soular Lab visual identity?”
View the full board HERE
As I continued to build the actual lecture in a Google document, I also designed the rollout flyers in Canva.
Keep in mind, Maurika Smutherman; the woman who put this talk together, also designed an amazing flyer so I didn’t have to worry about making anything for website use.
Flyer by Maurika Smutherman
At the top of the year I made a lab guide for myself detailing Soular Lab’s signature colors, fonts, lockups, etc. I pulled items from that guide to maintain visual consistency.
My flyers consisted of various styles of Arial font text (ofc), a customizable gradient circle, and my logo. I wanted to keep it simple because I knew that I would be packing in quite a bit of text.
I first created a blue 4:5 flyer, an invitation inspired by university acceptance letters, and a visitor pass to announce the talk on Instagram & X. (Formerly Twitter)
I decided to use blue as my backdrop because I wanted the posts to stand out to people when they visited Soular Lab’s Instagram page. I utilize black and white quite a bit, so I felt it would be a good contrast for newcomers. I also wanted current followers to be able to recognize when I was referring to the talk, as opposed to making a post about anything else.
I contemplated using orange but ultimately decided against it, because my pinned post was orange and didn’t want people to mix the details of the talk with overall details of the page.
Once the first post went live I created a blue 1:1 iteration of the flyer, and made four 1:1 carousel posts nodding at the themes of the talk & collage workshop that I would be hosting after.
Keeping with simplicity, I wanted the carousels to have a photojournalistic feel to them. A choice influenced by the images from my initial mood board.
With a degree in Multimedia Journalism this approach spoke directly to my expertise. With this information I believed these photos would serve as great starters to get viewers curious about the composition of the talk.
The third carousel of the four, was dedicated specifically to promoting the collage workshop being hosted exclusively for NC State students. With this carousel, I provided a brief overlook of my relationship with collage work, by highlighting Romare Bearden, a collage I made at 12 years old, and The Collage Ideas Book; a book I purchased last fall for fun that has unintentionally primed me for this spring season of work.
In the background I pushed through creative blocks, personal funks, and waves of anxiety that tried to convince me that I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to deliver this talk.
I had quite a few “coming to Jesus” moments to reel myself back in.
More than anything I was super excited to have the opportunity to give my first talk in my home state North Carolina, and I wanted everything to come together as seamless as possible.
4. PRESS
As I continued my preparation, I was presented with the opportunity to sit down with a Alianna Kendall Brooks, A writer for Nubian Message; NC State's sentinel newspaper for Black and marginalized students.
I haven’t done a proper interview in quite some time, so it was nice to chat with her about Soular Lab, my upbringing, my HBCU, the creative process, my love for Beyoncé & of course my talk & workshop.
In the past when I’ve done interviews they have been released solely online & the images that were used usually were a compilation of my most recent picture or photos that encapsulate my various artistic mediums from my vast personal archive.
This article was different. Along with the digital version, the story was also printed in their March 28th issue, making it my first print feature. When Alianna told me that the story would be included in the print issue I knew that I wanted to capture a new set of photos to accompany the words.
I hit up my good friend Hakeem Shabazz-Norris & he captured me in the Jefferson Market Library in NYC.
For my look I wore what I like to think is my signature gray oversized blazer, a t-shirt of the solar system, baggy dark washed jeans & my mary jane tabi’s. I accessorized the look with stacked necklaces, an orange bandanna, and black chunky aviator orange tinted lens sunglasses.
The theme of the look was, “young eclectic hippie professor.” (I’ll let you be the judge though)
Shot on Kodak Gold 200, the photos were everything that I imagined they would be.
[Bonus points for the accidental double exposure on two of the images *chef’s kiss*]
I also included these images in my rollout. Separate from the article itself, I wanted both the photos and the article to shine on their own. Even though they were working together to tell the same story. Also I needed unique content to post during the final days leading up to the talk. I figured if I posted the images first, then when the article came out after the talk, it would be easy to recognize the association of the story to the event. As well as provide another opportunity to drive people to view the photos.
5. TOUCHDOWN
I arrived in Raleigh the day before the talk. Maurika (The Organizer) & I, attended a dissertation defense along with a black graduate student symposium. It was my first time attending events of both kinds.
I always knew that I wanted to continue my education beyond undergrad, but being in these physical spaces and listening to these people talk about their studies & research along with their graduate school experiences outside of the classroom, opened my mind to continuing my education earlier than I thought. (But we’ll expand on this at a later time)
While in the African American Cultural Center, I spotted the flyer designed by Maurika & of course I had to snap photos because it looked so great. It was here that made everything feel so real to me.
6. PRESENTATION DAY
[Part 1 - A.M.]
On the day of talk I woke up extra early, because in typical Arial fashion I hadn’t finished creating all the materials to satisfy my ambitious plans to curate a specific experience for the attendees.
The first thing on the list was finishing my slideshow. (And before ya’ll get on me, I thought I was done. I sent over what I thought was the finished version a few days prior to be tested for any technical difficulties, but that version just didn’t quite feel complete.)
My to-do list included adding in animations, subtitles, fixing quotes and even adding an entire slide that was extremely important to illustrating my Creative Process. (That I somehow missed in my initial slideshow)
Designed in Canva, you can check out the final slideshow HERE
Once the slideshow was done, I created a cheat sheet for attendees to reference during the talk.
If you’ve read this far, then you know that I can be long winded. I’ve got a lot to say, and I know sometimes that can be overwhelming.
It was important that I provided them with a physical handout to help them get back on track just in case their minds wandered off during the talk.
I am not going to lie, in the heat of the moment I didn’t think I would have enough time to finish the design and get copies printed.
Many times I underestimate how long it will take me to put something together, even when I think I know the exact direction that I want to take it in.
It’s like having the cutest outfit in your head & then trying it on. It can either hit or miss & when it’s crunchtime, and you’re on the verge of being late, that outfit holds a lot of power. (spoiler alert this analogy quite literally happened to me that same day)
Thankfully though, it didn’t take me long to make this because I directly followed the formatting I used in the slideshow.
This “cheat sheet” included the talk objectives, a summary of the three main points + a space for them to write questions and/or doodle.
View the Full PDF HERE
Next on my morning to-do list was to clean up my personal lecture notes so that I could have a guide detailing the thoughts that provided context to the slideshow.
Prior to that morning I was working from the skeleton that I created at the beginning of my preparation. Throughout the process that original Google document lost its organization and became a dumping ground for the many sources it took to construct this talk. This didn’t include the full recollection of my personal connections to my findings and observations.
I used this version of the notes to clearly list out my unique takes on the main points, so that I could easily flow through the information and ensure that I wasn’t just regurgitating it to the audience, but adding my own two cents. This would also guarantee that through the points I would be revealing details about myself so that my audience could also learn more about me beyond the introduction slide.
I could have easily just used my laptop for reference, but I opted for print because I wanted to be able to feel the paper in my hands while I presented. As well as have the notes to serve as somewhat of a souvenir when it was all said and done.
Lastly I created a one page slide for the collage workshop that followed the talk. I had no idea who would be attending the workshop, so I assumed that there may be people who would come in and need help getting started.
This slide didn’t take me long to create. I typed up a brief description and added in two images sourced from Pinterest. (There were no sources linked to the images, but if you know their origin please let me know and I’ll be sure to link it)
I also packed The Collage Ideas Book with me so that people could pass it around & use it as a guide.
I emailed over my materials & it was time to get dressed.
Getting ready was pure chaos because I was pressed for time & the outfit I originally planned to wear sucked, so I had to think on the fly. Ultimately though, I like where I landed.
[Part 2 - P.M.]
I’m going to keep this section brief because instead of talking about how the lecture went, I think you should watch for yourself.
But before we get into how I feel about my performance, I want to highlight that the Nubian Message article hit stands the day of my presentation. When I entered the library I got to grab a few copies.
This moment was super special for me because I’ve wanted to be featured in a print anything for a while. Extremely proud of Alianna’s work. From title to the final quote I was gagged reading it.
You can check out the article HERE
Okay now for the lecture.
I am very proud of my delivery. I can see the moments where I let my nerves get the best of my words, but overall I am extremely pleased with how it came together.
For it to be my first public speaking event in a pretty large room, the turnout was good. (Honestly no one could have shown up & I still would have given my absolute best. So actually having people be there was a bonus)
I am excited to keep growing in my public speaking & gain new listeners, as I have so much to say. I understand that there is an art to delivering those messages & I want to become an expert.
Following the talk quite a few amazing people came up, introduced themselves, asked questions, and/or just talked to me about their artistic and creative journeys.
I felt so honored that they wanted to make a physical connection with me.
Once we wrapped, we made our way from the main library to the African American Cultural Center for the collage workshop.
When we arrived attendees filled the room and got straight to work, before I could even put the aid on the screen.
I felt relieved, because if I’m being honest I was starting to get a bit tired. It was nice to be able to be hands off and just interact with the people in the room, and that I did.
For the next few hours I chatted with some current students about everything from collages and pop culture, to music and fashion.
I learned that a lot of the people in the room were also from Charlotte, which was really nice.
Those who chose to give their undivided attention to the work in front them crafted complex pieces exploring various personal themes.
I am so happy that the attendees felt confident in the materials & what they could create with them, because the finishing collages did not disappoint.
It was a great workshop that I would absolutely host again.
7. THANK YOU
In conclusion, I want to say thank you to everyone who had a hand in bringing this talk and workshop to life.
More specifically I want to thank Maurika Smutherman for this opportunity. From beginning to end she made me feel confident and provided me with the necessary resources to give our attendees the absolute best experience.
It is important that we give flowers to the black women behind the scenes making and taking up space, and doing it so beautifully.
To show my appreciation for all of her help I designed her an exclusive capsule (Not for sale, but I still wanted to show you guys the designs)
The capsule featured a t-shirt, pinback button set, two sticker sheets and a notebook.
And because it’s not enough for me to just post this personal essay online, I turned it into a physical spiral bound journal.
Thank you for taking time out of your day to read this,
your view is appreciated!