Diamond Transition: [dahy-muhnd tran-zish-uhn] the end result of a failed alchemic effort undertaken by Microsoft in the 80s to keep audiences awake for periods longer than ten minutes.
The 80s may be a ten-year stain of memory on your brain that, looking back, you might have preferred to save for later tasks like remembering whether or not you have enough milk while at the grocery store. However you interpret the indelible Rorschach blot spanning the 80s department of your cerebral cortex, you have to admit one thing: the 80s were freakin’ awesome. There was good and bad, friend and enemy, popular and not. There was football, and there were cheerleaders. There was none of this millennial stuff, with the yoga, Pilates, self-esteem, and so on.
These days, there’s a sport for everyone, and everyone has a chance to be captain, but in those days you played football or spent lunch in your locker. Back then, high schools had real jocks, and they were always quarterbacks. Remember your high school quarterback? Remember how, after scoring a touchdown, he would take his helmet off and his glorious mullet would unroll like a red carpet, bouncing lightly as it extended well beyond the nape of his neck?
That, my friend, is exactly what the Diamond Transition is to presentations. As a healthy mullet was like Samson’s locks to your high school quarterback, so the Diamond Transition once captivated audiences everywhere as they listened to tales of “inter-nets” and personal computers from speakers whose eyes darted about beneath the upturned garage door sunglasses they sported. Nowadays, unfortunately, your high school quarterback has fallen from grace. He cut his mullet, and though he’s still an alpha wolf, he’s alpha wolf at a furniture store, where he runs the stock room. Such has been the fate of the Diamond Transition, forced to exist as it is in an Avatar world.
The Takeaway: Put it in reminiscent yearbook presentations to catapult your audience into the past, willing or otherwise. Apart from this specific use, avoid at all costs the Diamond Transition.
