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Steal This Presentation

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182 pointsAdrock23 comments

While this is a decent set of tips for design, the important thing to remember if you are actually giving a talk is that you are the presentation, not your slides.

Edit: That said, the right visual aids can be important for delivering a powerful message. I found this pretty useful in terms of making great looking slides that will actually help your talk by highlighting key points and keeping people's attention.

> the important thing to remember if you are actually giving a talk is that you are the presentation

I spoke with a "speaking coach" once and this was precisely his advice.

At the time, I was giving him a mock presentation in a small room and I was using a laser-pointer.

He told me "Unless you absolutely have to, NEVER use a laser-pointer. YOU are the presentation. If you have to point out a specific section of your slide, walk up to it and SMACK it with your hand. Then get back to communicating with your audience."

Well put.

Don Draper doesn't need Powerpoint.

That's because he has a Kodak Carousel. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus

There's nothing wrong with using visual aids to help you deliver your message.

Funny, that's just the scene I was thinking of.

Imagine if he had preceded his visual aids with a couple dozen boards of charts and bullet points, and shrunk the pictures down to quarter size to make room for blocks of text explaining what he was about to say.

Visual aids are great. Projecting the text of your speech on the wall, not so much.

Well, those recommendations make it impossible for you to just read whatever it says on the slide to give the presentation so in a way they are also about the content of your presentation.

True, but even if the right visual aids can help you, the wrong ones can make your presentation terrible, this is where I think this presentation also helps.

The two most important things I've learned about presentations:

1. Look at your audience, not your slides. They didn't show up to look at the back of your head.

2. Put as little on the screen as possible. If you have more you want them to read/remember afterward, make a handout with the detailed stuff. You want your audience looking at YOU, not a slide on the wall.

Nancy Duarte was handing out copies of her book "Slideology" to speakers at the BIL 2009 conference - it was the best schwag I've ever gotten. I can't recommend her blog enough: http://slideology.com/

I'd gotten tired of seeing the standard preso format of alternating cute/wacky Creative Commons images with stark, pithy blocks of Helvetica text, so I started exploring different approaches to presentations.

There are three "hacks" of a sort I've employed to try to make my talks more engaging, less clunky:

One is to just not use any slides. Show code, run demos, talk about what I'm actually doing on the machine during the talk. I type stuff at a shell prompt or into an editor (embiggen the fonts!) if I need Text on a Screen.

More often I use a simple enhanced-Textile -> HTML/CSS/JS app I wrote. Charcoal background, white text. It's sort of flakey about resizing text for screen rez, which makes it hard to reliably put a lot of text on a slide; this a bug that works for the power of good. I like that I can generate slides from notes, and quickly edit and reload.

My favorite, though also most time-consuming, approach is to hand-draw all the slides. (See http://vimeo.com/13163175 or http://vimeo.com/12993236).

Hand-drawing your slides also has an interesting technological side-effect: depending on what tools you use it becomes much harder to obsess over them and hack on them at the conference right up until you give the talk. I've been using Illustrator on my mac, but my laptops run Ubuntu and/or Win7, neither of which has Illustrator on it. I've done last-minute things in GIMP, but there's strong incentive to avoid that.

Aside form the visual look, a key aspect is duration. I like short talks. 20 minutes, 40 minutes tops. It's hard to compete with twitter, IRC back-channel, and an audience that has a million things they could be doing. Better to leave people wanting more. Generate enough interest to get people curious to learn more, and kick off some hallway discussions.

I was going to DL this to peruse later... then found it was a 51MB pdf. Really: got to love that slideshare.

I thought this pretty weak compared to, for example, "Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs" by Carmine Gallo.

And... all the plugs for SlideShare in the presentation: what's with that? Started to feel like more of an infomercial than anything. I'd recommend spending 15 minutes just scanning Gallo's book at a book (I did. then bought it anyway.)

All that account ever does is upload the same presentation about doing better presentations and using slideshare over and over again.

I dig this presentation in pieces, but it's a bit noisy and pretentious.

Why is it that so many people are trying to tell me how to present my information?

I do use images as recommended, and find that they make great cues for telling stories and fleshing out the idea, but come on...are bullet points really that bad?

I think the problem has been the overuse of bullet points. I'm sure there are times when they are appropriate, such as when these slides listed what CRAP means, but in most cases I've seen, the information would have presented better with an alternative format.

The last few presentations I myself have given tended to follow the Lessig style, so instead of bulleted lists, I've presented each item in its own slide. This allowed me to bring the audience's focus on the one thing I'm discussing at the moment, instead of wandering off into what the other items are/could be and how they relate to or contrast with each other.

I read somewhere of the backlash against Powerpoint in the military, and the primary reason stated was the overuse of bulleted lists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html

Coming from 5 years in the Army, I can attest to what they call - "Death by Powerpoint." It's not just the bullets, but the use of templates that suck, formats that suck, and well...information that sucks.

Perhaps it's not the bullets that kill, but the animated ones :)

I generally focus on powerful images and one to three word phrases and use slides largely as an "emotion force multiplier."

Even so, I don't believe any slide holds a candle to an exceptionally structured, well-told story. People remember those a lot longer than a pretty deck.

Way too much text on some of these slides... that's what loses the audience. Break down information into smaller parts and present them on short, separate slides. This creates a fluid and engaging visual element to complement the verbal element.

"Way too much text on some of these slides... that's what loses the audience. "

Some of that way-too-much text explains that were this a real, in-person, presentation the text content would be severely cut back.

Good point.

and practice, practice, practice.

Sometimes, yes, but I've found "too-practiced" talks to be a bit off-putting as an audience member, especially if it's supposed to be more academic subject material. Probably not an issue if you're giving a TED talk, or you're doing a product rollout, but if I'm listening to a computer-science talk, and it's going to err in one direction or another, I'd rather have the not-that-rehearsed talk that fumbles a bit, versus the perfectly-scripted one that feels more like I'm watching a performance than listening to a scientist give me information.

72 slides with that much text? It's tacky but, tl;dr. Oh come on. I love that I've already been downvoted since there is no way that anyone even went through half of those slides in the time that has elapsed since my comment. It's seventy-two slides.

It seems that this presentation was made just for distribution on the internet (i.e. no actual presenter). The presentation itself even makes reference to the fact that it would be less wordy if it were being given to a live audience.

I went through them all and posted earlier. Maybe you had less patience because you were getting upset ablutions the wordy slides?

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