I must seem a total stick-in-the-mud when it comes to slide design at times. I talk all about slides to avoid. I go one about image and background quality. I rant about fonts. Really, all I want is for your professional presentations to look better and more effectively reinforce the things you are trying to communicate. Still, some topics beg for a more casual and "fun" approach to slide design. Here are two examples in my own catalogue.

For some time, I've been working on a presentation about using Scrabble in classroom settings. Scrabble is a game, and I couldn't help but pay homage to its distinctive gamepaly on many of the slides in painstakingly recreating tiles on which much text appears.

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Add to this fact that every slide has numerous animations and builds (I'm particularly proud of some of the slides that record scores), and you end up with a presentation that breaks most rules of sensible design. The great thing, though? The presentation works anyway.

In about a month, I'm going to be giving a talk at a conference in Indianapolis discussing the merits of positive reinforcement in video games and classroom application. Video games! How can you pass up having fun with that topic?

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(I picked up material that helped with these slides from this blog.)

Silly fonts, bright colors, tons of animations again, and here we have a presentation that tells sensibility to take a long walk off a short pier. Regardless, the slides fit the talk, and they entertain while they reinforce.

I would never suggest this approach with talks about serious subjects, but, occasionally, topics lend themselves to fun. Remember, though: quality still counts, and whimsy is no excuse for a sloppy job. Creating fun slides is serious business and takes as much work as any other presentation. If done well, though, fun presentations can be every bit as engaging and effective as more professional ones.

Tags: conventions

This one's going to seem hypocritical. If you've seen any of my slidecasts, you know that every one of those has a title slide – but we'll get to that in a minute. Usually, this slide precedes the mandatory "About Me" slide in a talk, and it tells you what you are going to hear about and who is delivering the message.


(Of course it needs a logo!)

In reality, chances are your audience knows what they are coming to hear, and if they don't know who you are, attaching your name to a slide offers no enlightenment. Like other slides we've talked about, the title is filler. It's expected and predicable, and you want to be typified by neither of those qualities. In public settings, forego the title slide, and just dive into your material from slide one. You'll save time that is better spent on your material, and you will succeed engaging in your audience more immediately.

Explanation

Why then do my presentations have titles? Simple: first, some were made before I began adopting many of the principals I now advocate. Additionally, I find that the title slides make for nice placeholders on my presentations page. They allow you, the reader, to see the topic of the presentation and get a preview of the look and feel of that specific presentation. In this setting, it seems appropriate.

Tags: conventions, avoid

In my very first post on this blog, I emphasized the importance of trying to be concise with one's material. There are many examples of long, very engaging presentations, but, for the most part, you don't want to make a habit out of speaking for long stretches of time.



No matter your intentions, though, avoid beginning your presentation with something like this: "I'm only going to keep you for a little while;" "I'm planning on keeping this short;" or "This won't take long." Think back about talks you've heard starting with similar phrases. What's the common theme? Chances are most to all of them did take a long time.

I think we try to talk ourselves into believing our presentation is not as long as it really is. With good intentions, we try to fool ourselves and the audience about the time we are going to spend, but telling an audience that your talk is going to be short does not make the talk feel shorter. In fact, the opposite is true. The time you take to deliver your material will seem even more prolonged due to the expectation you planted in the minds of your audience.

Long or short, if your talk is engaging, length is relative. Don't sabotage yourself by planting a false expectation before you begin.

Tags: time use, speaking

One of the things that frustrates me about my new cell phone is that it takes seven button presses to tell it to dial someone in my address book. (No, I have not set up my quick dial yet.) Seven presses – exactly the same numbers of buttons I would use to just dial the number. It's just too complicated. I get it. I'm a technophile, so I understand how it operates. It's just annoying.

Unfortunately, many slides trip down this same path. The audience gets it. They understand the meaning of the slides, but the slides are overcomplicated. Visually, they are as annoying as the cell phone's menus.

These Microsoft slides are favorites of mine. I honestly don't think I could design more visually complicated slides if I tried.

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© Microsoft. How complicated can you get?

What ends up being the result? The speaker has to keep referencing the slide, pointing out various areas, and defining what the slide is explaining. It becomes tedious and exhausting. The slides do not support the talk. Rather, the talk is supporting the slides. This is the danger in overcomplicating your slides. You may accidentally let yourself become servant to the visuals.

In contrast, if you set simplicity as a standard in your design, clearer results happen. Many claim the iPod's runaway success is due, largely in part, to its simplicity of design. The same is true of the Nintendo DS. David Pogue spoke at length for TED 2006 about the "Cult of Simplicity." Simplicity sells – not just products but ideas as well. Keep your slides simple and clean, and your audience will be more likely to buy into your message because they are no longer distracted by trying to decipher complex visuals.

Here is one way to simplify the slides above:

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Same message, different approach. (Windows screenshots from GUIdebook.)

It would be unfair to say that there is never a place for complex slides, but, more often than not, simplicity trumps the alternative. When preparing your presentation, have others look at your slides. Ask them if they easily understand the big ideas conveyed. How much reading is involved with your slides? Are they visually cluttered? Make simplicity a standard, and understanding will follow.

Tags: philosophy, examples, makeover, clutter, graphics, design

We are very much influenced by our sense of sight. As a rule, we are very visual beings, and imagery can generate a large impact on people. Think of how often you would rather someone show you how to do something than tell you. Wouldn't you rather see something fantastic than just hear it being described? Why then do we create presentation slides that merely reiterate our words and do not visually reinforce our message?


In this case, I'm not talking about inserting Office Clip Art or "Screen Beans" (who deserve the same public flogging as Clippy). I'm talking about meaningful high-quality visuals your audience can connect with and be impacted by. Photographs and art can bring so much more to our talk than can simple sketches, bitmaps, and vector images. The right image can connect with people in ways words cannot, and that connection is an important part of your audience connecting with you.

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What if Al Gore had used Clip Art? (Image from Apple Computer.)

Take Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth presentation as an example. What if Mr. Gore had taken a more "traditional" PowerPoint approach? What if he had used Clip Art and bullet points in place of photographs and satellite images? Would his presentation been as powerful? Would his message have gained as much momentum as it has? Even if the content were identical, I would say no. Part of the allure in Al Gore's material is the great use of images.

When we stick with bullet points and Clip Art on our slides, we are short-changing our own presentation. Slides are visual by nature. Your audience is visual. Use the slides to say things you can't, to make connections words alone are unable to. Go beyond what you are used to seeing, and use images in your slides that are meaningful to your content and create an impact on your audience.

Some Image Resources

• iStockPhoto - this is a great, inexpensive source for stock photography.
• stock.xchng - all images here are free, but pay attention to attribution if requested.
• morgueFile - loads of free images. Quality varies.
• yotophoto - free image search engine.

Al Gore Links (for the curious)

• An Inconvenient Truth - official movie website.
• Changing the Climate - an Entertainment Weekly story about Gore's documentary.
• Presentation Zen: Al Gore: Another Presenter Extraordinaire? - Garr on Gore.
• Duarte Design: New Model Science Teacher - the people behind Al Gore's visuals talk about the process.

Tags: graphics, philosophy, al gore, examples, design

You just finished your presentation. you gave your summation, and now you launch into the question-and-answer section. Ten to fifteen minutes later, the questions fizzle out, and the crowd trickles away. Is this really how you want to conclude your talk?

In my last post (about summations), I stated that your summation is important because it leaves a final impression on your audience. This is only true, though, if the summation is the last thing that happens. If you save the Q&A for the conclusion, that will leave the final impression. Unfortunately, presentations that end with Q&A sessions often end on an uncertain note because there is little sense of closure. No matter how strong the overall session, a concluding Q&A can weaken the overall experience.

The solution? Conduct the Q&A before the summation. I've gotten into the habit of wrapping up my final point, launching into a timed question/answer session, then delivering my summation. Make sure you have contact information on your handout because you will likely not get to everyone's questions, but this allows the conversational portion of the presentation to take place under controlled settings. (Timing the Q&A also helps with schedule management.)

Once you conclude the Q&A, you can launch into the summation and wrap up your presentation with a definitive conclusion. As a result, you and your audience will walk away feeling better about your presentation.

Tags: time use, atmosphere, speaking

Back in September, Garr Reynolds posted this image on his blog without comment. Regular readers knew what he was trying to get across.


Image by Zach Graham

One easy way to kill the momentum of our presentations is to bog the conclusion down with tedious bullet points. (The other way is by ending with your Q & A session, but we'll talk about that another time.) I remember the conclusion to a Jensen Harris presentation on Office 2007 where I noticed how excited he seemed about the product, but his conclusion slide seemed sterile and stoic. I wondered, "How can this be improved?"

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Again, minimalism is my starting point, and I felt that these three words pretty much encapsulated the entire summary. ("Find the right feature" + "Be more efficient" = "Simplify" in my book.) The word "Create" is by far the largest because that is the driving point of Office – to create content that you are likely to share with others. Also, I arced the path of the builds to create a sense of movement and perspective.

Of course, as I look through some of my presentations that haven't been updated in a year or so, I'm finding some concluding slides I want to change. Here are some summations I like and others I don't from my own material. Which ones would you change? How would you give them more impact?

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Of course, it can be hard to judge a summation without context of an entire presentation, but experiment with these slides and see how you can alter or improve them. Remember, your summation will be the final impression you leave on your audience. Don't let it be injured by stray bullets.

Tags: examples, text, garr reynolds, connections

My proposal for ICE 2007 has been accepted! My session is called "Video Games, Positive Reinforcement, and Your Brain." I'll be posting a temporary page here on my site about the session in coming weeks. ICE 2006 was a great experience, and (if you can't tell) I'm pretty excited about this opportunity!

Wish me luck!

Tags: my talks

Is it me, or do we see agenda slides just about everywhere? We presenters can't seem to help ourselves, and, before any meeting or presentation, a slide like this will be staring everyone in the face. Now don't get me wrong. It's appropriate to pass out agendas from time to time. Just because I can't think of an example doesn't mean they don't exist. However, the agenda has no real reason to be incorporated into your slides.



Your audience can handle solid food. An agenda slide is a form of spoon-feeding – plain and simple. In most settings, your audience is intelligent enough to follow what's going on without point-by-point preparation. Chances are good you are working with professionals who are quick and flexible in their thinking. An agenda slide kind of insults that intelligence.

Who's going to remember anyway? Honestly, five minutes into the talk or meeting, no one is going to remember all of the agenda points. If you handed out an agenda, why did you stick it on a slide? That's just redundant.

Only three more items, and we're outta here! Face it – you just gave the meeting participants a checklist. They will continually refer back to your agenda to see how close you are to finishing. It becomes more of a distraction than a facilitator to anything.

I know I'm going to get some flack from colleagues regarding this post. Agenda slides are old hat. We're used to them, so why bother eliminating them? Quite simply, it comes down to the small touches. If you want your presentation to stand out as unique and individual, sidestep cliché and the mundane whenever you can. An audience won't be distracted by the absence of an agenda – and that is exactly what you want.

Tags: conventions, time use, avoid

You are not always going to be presenting under ideal circumstances. In these cases, it can be handy to know some ways to make your slides more appropriate for certain settings if you know ahead of time what variables you might be running into.

It's Not My Computer!

This is the most common situation you may find yourself in for a myriad of reasons. I've had to present on other computers twice now, and, if you speak publicly enough times, you will find yourself in a situation where you have to use another machine. Here are some ways to account for this.

Embed All of Your Files (Keynote + PowerPoint) In Keynote's save dialog box, you have the option to copy movies, audio, and images into the document. This ensures nothing is lost when another Mac opens your presentation. PowerPoint has a similar option in the File menu. You can choose "Package for CD," and PowerPoint will make sure that all file dependencies are packaged together.

Make a Movie (Keynote + PowerPoint) Both Keynote and PowerPoint allow for creating a movie of your slides which a program like QuickTime will be able to play. It will look like your presentation without having to rely on a specific application being present on the other machine. In Keynote, use File > Export. In PowerPoint, use File > Make a Movie. (This option may only be present in the Mac version of PowerPoint.)

Make a PDF or Image Folder (Keynote) Again, using the export option, you can create a PDF document of all slides in your presentation. You can even make each build into its own page. In these instances, animated transitions and multimedia files will not be able to play, but you should be able to run these versions of your slideshow on slower hardware. The PDF can be opened in Acrobat Reader or Preview and viewed in fullscreen mode, or you can view the folder of images as a slideshow from within the Finder, Windows Explorer, or iPhoto.


Presentation slides in iPhoto

I Have No Computer

If this is the case, you might want to think about ditching slides entirely. However, if you have a photo-capable iPod, you could export your presentation from Keynote as images and import them into iPhoto. Sync your iPod, and you are ready to go. Again, animated transitions and embedded multimedia files will not play, but your content will be visible.

My Presentation Is Teleconferenced

With web applications like Adobe Breeze and programs like Leopard's iChat, there is the possibility that you might have to give a presentation online at some point. If this is the case, it is imperative to take bandwidth into consideration.


Image from Apple's Leopard Preview

If sharing your presentation over a network, the best thing you can do is eliminate animated transitions and audio files. This will significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth your presentation needs to be seen by everyone else, resulting in a far smoother experience for your intended audience.

Conclusion

You will not always be presenting under ideal circumstances, so make sure you have backup plans. If you know a variable is coming your way, prepare for it. Make the accommodations as transparent as possible. Your stress level will reduce, and, as a result, your audience will be able to get more out of your talk.

One of the tougher questions I get when helping someone assemble a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation is this: "Which background (or theme) should I use?"



Every presentation is different, and, as such, each has a unique style and feel. The backgrounds you choose should be appropriate for that feel and act as a suitable backdrop for your content. Okay, that's a vague answer – here are some guidelines I like to follow.

Avoid Distracting Backgrounds

The background should not be so colorful or busy that it distracts from the material you are presenting. You want your audience to focus on content – not the cool image that serves as the backdrop. Compare these two approaches:

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Remember, first and foremost, your slides are there to reinforce your material. A distracting background will not help with that goal.

Don't Be a Cookie

Some themes (especially those in PowerPoint) are just plain overused. Try to avoid backgrounds that look stale and stereotypical. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: don't let PowerPoint tell you how your slides should look. You take charge of the appearance of your slides. Sometimes, this means you should build your slides from scratch, and this includes picking your own background.

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The first slide was created using a standard PowerPoint template. The second started as a blank slide, and I chose elements that seemed to best reinforce my message. (By the way, all of those points on the first slide are included on the second, but they are revealed with built images rather than text.) Does the second slide take more time and effort to create than the first? Yes, but the results are worth it.

It's Okay to Change

You don't have to keep the exact same background behind every single slide. Again, here is an example from some slides I'm working on regarding Christianity and environmental responsibility.

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As the slides move away from the theme of creation, I abandon the star-field that acts as a backdrop to the previous slide and replace it with a grassy field. Other slides will have other backdrops. Yes, in many of my presentations, the backdrop remains consistent, but it does not have to be that way. In fact, sometimes it is appropriate to change backgrounds as the content in your slides evolves from premise to conclusion or through different sections.

Give Yourself Room

I bend this guideline from time to time, but I've seen space on slides misused often enough to mention it: Don't create a slide that constrains your space. In Keynote, for example, most default themes give you an 800x600 or 1024x768 canvass. Don't use a layout that restricts this space.

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Sometimes you may want to create a frame for your material, which will cut down a little on space, but you don't want a slide that is completely restrictive in its proportions. I've seen slides like this first example a few times, and they are never effective visual communication. Constricting backgrounds only lead to cluttered slides.

My Picks + Conclusion

In closing, here are some Keynote themes I tend to build my presentations around. I find they make good themes in and of themselves while also lending themselves to flexibility and customization.



It's almost become a mantra here to say that your slides should be uniquely you, and the theme or backdrop you choose for your slides is part of that process. If you can avoid some common pitfalls many stumble into when choosing backgrounds for your slides, your audience will notice at some level. It may be subtle, but it goes a long way toward making your presentation as effective as it can be.

Tags: themes, backgrounds, graphics, readability

Like PowerPoint, Keynote lends itself well to those purely photographic experiences. Maybe it's a project for an anniversary or birthday that chronicles happy memories. Perhaps the pictures capture a significant event or milestone in one's life. Whatever the reason, these photo montages are fun to assemble and even more enjoyable to share. With Keynote, one method of sharing these projects is by creating a DVD, and you can get this done using nothing but the software that comes standard with every modern Mac.
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The photo presentation I'm using as an example was played at our fifth graders' completion ceremony last year. It contained 155 slides and about 275 images (not counting built text on some slides). This is a big slideshow, but I'm going to try to give you a good idea on how to get from blank slides to a DVD you can share with family and friends.
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Organize in iPhoto

If you are going to be using several images in Keynote, it is a good idea to get them all organized in iPhoto first. This way, you can directly access the images from Keynote's Media Browser rather than having to constantly switch between your presentation and a folder of images. (This also works with the most recent version of Aperture.)



Before I import any images, I set up a folder named after the school I work at. After that, I create albums within that folder named after the different fifth grade teachers, events, or other related category. For example, last year some of my albums may have been titled "Shanks," "YMCA Camp," and "Other Teachers." By the time all photos are imported, I will usually have between 500 and 750 images catalogued, and, hopefully, every staff member and every fifth grade student will be accounted for.

Composite in Keynote

Next comes the fun step: putting it all together! Needless to say, not very picture is used, but Keynote gets a workout in this process nevertheless. For the sake of article length, I'm going to assume you have a basic understanding of how Keynote works and you know how to insert, adjust, and mask images from within the application. Here I'm going to focus on some tips to help you through this process and optimize your presentation for viewing on a standard television screen.

Watch Your Space. When your Keynote presentation gets viewed on a standard television, not every inch of the slide will be visible. Plan for the space that will be off-screen. Personally, I use an overlay from Keynote User that sets a red line around the TV-screen borders. You can go here to get it.


What you see versus what a TV will see.

Start Timing Early. When setting a presentation to auto-play, Keynote has limited options, but you can take control of those options with the Build Inspector. Use the "More Options" pane to fine tune your settings, and make sure every build is set to transition automatically so you can check timing with your music selection. Just launch the song in iTunes, and play your presentation. This will give a decent idea of how the music will fit with your visuals. If you have multiple songs, set up a Playlist ahead of time.

On this note, you might be wondering why I'm not recommending using the Document Inspector to set the audio before playing the presentation – excluding the need for iTunes (or other audio source). Simply, if you use the Document Inspector, two things may get in the way. First, it can be tricky using this method to select more than one song from iTunes. Second, the audio may become disjointed or choppy if the times for the slideshow and the music do not match.

Watch Your Transitions. Depending on how you choose to encode, some transitions may be problematic. Personally, I tend to avoid Burn, Drop, Push Up, and Push Down slide transitions. Drop and Fly-In builds may also cause problems, but using H.264 has reduced the issues I've had with these. (I use MPG-4 for the site, so I still avoid these by force of habit.)

Basically, if your plan your slideshow out from the beginning, knowing that a TV will be the final destination for sharing your work, you should be in good shape. Patience is key, though. The first couple of times I went through this process, I ran into several problems. The more I've done it, the smoother the process has become.

Export to iMovie

Once your document is complete, select Export from the File menu. When the sheet appears, make sure you have selected QuickTime. The default settings should be fine for importing into iMovie, but you may have to tweak slide and build durations to get a length that most closely matches your music. Unfortunately, this step can be quite time consuming unless you have a G5 or Core Duo equipped Mac.



Before you take the next step, view your file in QuickTime to make sure everything looks okay. Now is the time to find glitches – not when you are already in iMovie. This step can get frustrating at times, but it will be more frustrating if you find an error after you took the time to import this file into iMovie!

Next, open iMovie, and drag the QuickTime file into the timeline at the bottom of the window. If you are planning on adding various clips, you may want to drop it in the clips well instead.



Once in iMovie, I really only worry about two additions. First, I use the media pane to add my music to the timeline as well as the audio clips of interviews I conducted with the children. (This usually involves some volume tweaking as well.) Then I add chapter markers to the movie that will become selectable on the DVD. To add a chapter, you move the slider in the timeline to the point you want a chapter to begin and click "Add Marker" in the chapters pane.

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Once you are finished in iMovie, it's time to click "Share" in the menu bar and select "iDVD." iDVD will automatically launch, and your iMovie project will be imported.

iDVD: The Final Step

The last step is the easiest but the most time-consuming. In iDVD, use the themes pane to select a menu theme. (I'm using Reflection Black in this screenshot). Next, use the media pane to add images to the menu. Finally, click on the shutter next to the volume slider to burn your project to a DVD. Warning: This will take a while. Don't plan on baby-sitting the computer while this is going on. Furthermore, if you are making multiple copies, it takes less time to create subsequent copies than the first one.

Once iDVD ejects your disc, you are done. Pop the DVD into a standard player, sit back, and enjoy your masterpiece!

Technical Notes:

• In Keynote, if H.264 is giving you problems, try MPG-4 at 24 fps. This usually does the trick if I'm having problems exporting.
• In iMovie and iDVD, your project will look pixelated on the computer screen. This is normal because it is being converted into a standard TV resolution, which is much lower than your computer's resolution.
• I have never tested one of my projects on an HD-TV. I don't know how it will look on one of these, but I know they look fine on standard televisions.
• This process may not work with iMovie '08 and later.

Tags: software, how-to

In a few past updates, I have noted changes made to various slide presentations. Some on this site have seen multiple revisions since being posted, and the reason for this is simple: these are the talks I share the most.

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I keep the first version of "Salvation Through Water" (as well as the first version of "Understanding RAD") laying around just to remind me how far I have come in my own slide design philosophy. Both of these are among the first presentations I gave using slides, and they have evolved greatly since their inception – right along with my views of slide design.

Slides are not set in stone once you create them. They are living documents that you should update and change as needed. Imagine if Al Gore never updated the information on his climate crisis slides. What if education speakers allowed their slides to continually display information based on out-of-date research? Before long, the material would be useless.

Every time I give a specific talk, I revisit the slides that go with the talk to see how they can be updated or improved. No presentation is every truly complete. No matter how comfortable you are with the material, no matter how used to a routine you may be, take the time to look over your slides when you revisit a presentation. Not only does the process refresh the material in your own mind, but you may also find more fresh and engaging ways of visually presenting your material.

Many of Keynote's default slide backgrounds are pretty good. In fact, I'm very fond of the background found in Apple's Storyboard theme (pictured). However, using that background on other objects can prove tricky.



What I wanted to do in revising a presentation was create a more random layout for my built text. Pictured below is the original slide followed by the outcome where I used a foreground object that uses the Storyboard background. This looks easier than it really was.

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In order to pull something like this off, you need to know a little bit about how Mac OS X stores certain application information. Many Mac OS X applications are "packages." Put simply, this means what you see as an application is actually a series of directories that makes the program work all bundled up together. If an application is a package, the command "Show Package Contents" will be available in the contextual menu if you right-click the icon.

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If you select to show contents, a new window will open with a set of vaguely named folders. (You may have to open a folder called "Contents" to see these depending on the application.) The information we are looking for is in the folder called "Resources." Don't mess with anything in this folder, you are just looking for another folder called "Themes."



Once you open this folder, you'll see a bunch of Keynote theme files with the extension ".kth." If you double-click on any of these themes, Keynote will open a new presentation using the theme you selected. That's not what you want to happen. Again, "Show Package Contents" comes to the rescue. Once you find a file called "theme_plain.tiff" (where theme is the name of the theme you are browsing), copy and paste that file to someplace you will remember. Do not move the image itself! Use copy and paste.

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Now that we have the backgrounds we want copied to another location, we can use them on objects in our presentation. First, create your object. Then, using the Inspector, set the object to "Image Fill." Then you can browse for the image you want, or you can drag it into the image well on the inspector. Choose "Scale to Fill" to make sure the image fills the entire object, and you're done.

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If you think you're going to use these backgrounds often, you should probably make a folder or an iPhoto album in which to store them all for easy access. You can also find image resources for charts and graphs this way, and this same trick got me the sticky note image seen in my second slide at the top of the post. (It came from opening up the Stickies Dashboard widget.) A final word of warning though – messing in the resource folders of application packages can really mess up the program if you move or delete anything. Remember, if you find something you want to use, copy it, and paste that copy to another location.

Update: I've discovered this method does not work for Keynote 1 themes. To extract a legacy theme's background, follow the steps above, but now you are looking for either "theme_bk.pdf" of "theme_cover.pdf." (Again, theme represents the name of the theme you are browsing.) I hope this helps some of my readers who got confused when opening up themes like Parchment!

Tags: software, how-to

It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads my blog when I say I am not a fan of mission statements. While I think direction and purpose is vital to any organization's success, mission statements are seldom more than buzzword laden paragraphs designed to impress an audience rather than direct and inspire our colleagues.

Moreover, like the About Me slide, the Mission Statement can serve little purpose when plastered onto presentation slides.



If you are giving a presentation to your employees, they should already know what your organization or company is about. You should be communicating that through your decisions and actions on a daily basis. If leaders embody the mission, then employees will understand and follow suit. If leaders and administrators are contradicting the mission, repetition of words will not undo the message you have communicated through your example. (By the way, making your staff unison recite a mission statement is creepy – like 1984 creepy.)

If the presentation is for those outside your organization, the services or products you deliver should be a testament to your mission. Like your example to employees, if your output contradicts your mission, consumers will only grow cynical and indifferent toward your offerings.

Missions have their place, but a Mission Statement is only for the benefit of managers and administration to guide their examples and decisions. Employees and consumers will know your mission if you live it. A slide does nothing to reinforce that message.

Tags: conventions, text, avoid

File this entry under "handy tips" in your brain. Keynote uses layered backgrounds in all of its themes, and these are very handy for quickly adding images to your presentation without having to create masks or custom frames. This is how it works:

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Nifty, huh? All I have to do is drag the photo into the designated area, and I have a framed or inset image. It's not terribly flexible, but it is a good way to get nice results quickly. However, in many themes, the cutouts could be suitable for any content you might want to draw attention to – not just pictures. Here are some examples:

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In the first image, a cutout is being used to give a graph a more organic feel. (The "droplet" is an image cutout in that slide.) In the second image, the photo cutout is being used to frame a quote. In the third, I am using the cutouts to mask an image, but I am using two separate cutouts for one image.

Many third party themes have very creative cutouts in their slides allowing for some unique uses. Don't let the label "photo cutout" limit you. If the presentation you are giving warrants it, get creative with your use of cutouts. This is just one more way you can let built-in features of applications like Keynote enhance your presentation slides.

As an aside, all of these screenshots (except the Clemenceau quote) use third party themes from Jumsoft. Visit my Presentations page for more theme resource links.

Tags: software, graphics

In presentations, getting "naked" refers to giving a talk without the aid of slides. This can be difficult because so many of us have grown to use slides as a crutch. (See this entry at Presentation Zen for a great illustration of that fact.) However, in many circumstances, abandoning slides is a good idea.



One example of this comes from my obsessive downloading of featured TED Talks, one of which has Sir Ken Robinson speaking about how education can sometimes "educate" the creativity right out of the child. His speech is engaging and thought-provoking, but not one slide is shown during his talk. In fact, slides would have probably distracted from the overall feel of his presentation.

Slides can greatly reinforce of our content, and they can often help create connections between our material and multiple areas of our audience's brains. However, sometimes they are just unnecessary filler. If this is the case, leave the laptop at home (or in the hotel room), and present naked. Don't hide behind your slides. Just let your audience see you for who you are.

For more tips on presenting naked or nearly-naked, follow these links (all by Garr Reynolds):

• Make Your Next Presentation Naked
• Clear Visuals With as Little Text as Possible
• Great Presentations Are Great Conversations

Tags: TED, examples, conventions, garr reynolds, connections

Dearest laser pointer, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways ...

In many business and technical presentations (as well as in the education field) it is not unusual to see someone whip out a laser pointer during his of her presentation to highlight important details on the slides. Somehow, if the important points are not already clear enough, this tiny shaking red dot is supposed to bring clarity to the situation.

The simple fact of the matter is this: if you prepared your slides well, you will never – and I mean never – need to use a laser pointer. Never.

Why do we even use those little things? Do we really think they are effective at highlighting points, or do we just feel more professional holding it? Like bulleted slides, does the pointer create a sense of security and comfort when we are presenting? I don't know. I've never used one, but I've seen them plenty of times and have played "find the dot" during many presentations – even some given at church!

Like slides, we have come to use the pointer as a crutch. Our slides are not clear, so we use the red dot to light the way – separating important bullets and charts from the filler we put in so we don't look unprepared.

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The above are two slides that we might feel merit the use of a laser pointer. There is a ton of information on each slide, and we want to make sure our audience knows exactly what the most important facts on each slide are. However, instead of using a pointer, what if we just simplified our approach?

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Stripping out the unnecessary makes it easier to emphasize the vital information. In this case, the most important facts include how much laptops are outpacing desktops by and the reasons consumers are choosing laptops over desktops. (By the way, these figures are completely made up, so don't cite them elsewhere.)

Still, there might be times that we feel the inspiration to highlight something that seems earth-shattering to us. In this case, during my talk, I might decide to draw my audience's attention to the fact that many modern laptops are perceived to be every bit as capable as desktops. At this point, a handy little utility called OmniDazzle comes to my rescue.



Using a designated keystroke, OmniDazzle creates a spotlight effect (or one of several other effects) in the cursor location, enabling me to highlight this text much more effectively than if I began waving a red pinpoint around. Alternatively, if I had this point planned out, I could have created a similar effect from within Keynote without needing to resort to an additional application.

Laser pointers are wholly unnecessary. They don't help you clarify your points; they can be difficult for the audience to see; and they are often symptomatic of slides that are too cluttered to begin with. Before you think to pack that pointer, rethink your slides and how you can simplify them.

Bonus: While I was working on this post, I found this article on KeynoteUser that has a ton of great tips on how to avoid using pointers. Go check it out!

Tags: conventions, clutter, readability

One of the things that caught me off guard in the video of David Pogue speaking at TED was the fact that his talk began with him sitting behind a piano, singing about tech support woes in a parody of Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence."



In and of itself, Mr. Pogue's talk was pretty good. It was humorous and insightful, and it was delivered very competently. What made it stand out, though, was Pogue's use of songs throughout his presentation. Quite suddenly, he would just bolt to the piano, and regale his audience with a modified rendition of Simon & Garfunkel, Barry Manilow, and even Andrew Lloyd Webber.

See, David Pogue used his unique background as a musician to bring an element of surprise and humor to his talk. What unique abilities or insights do you have that can make your presentations unique and unforgettable? What is something that makes you uniquely you? Remember, your presentations don't have to merely consist of slides and droning. Allow your individuality to shine through, and you might find your talks more enjoyable for you and your listeners.

Tags: TED, examples, atmosphere, impression, connections, david pogue

One speaker whom I've really begun to appreciate (much to my own surprise) is Al Gore, self-described as having "used to be the next president of the United States." Recently, he has been evangelizing a message of conservation and energy reform in response to what he coins "The Climate Crisis." Additionally, this presentation has been turned into a documentary called An Inconvenient Truth.

Recently, I downloaded a video of Mr. Gore giving a follow-up talk to his crisis presentation at TED where he covers some pragmatic ways in which his audience can make a difference. (If you watch the video, please keep in mind that he is speaking to an audience consisting mostly of rather affluent people.) However, I couldn't help but be distracted by the amount of "back time" Mr. Gore was giving to his audience – time he spent looking at his slides rather than at his listeners.

I see this all too often during presentations where the presenter uses his or her slides as a crutch or as a substitute for notes. Unfortunately, if we spend too much time with our back to the audience, we will create a disconnect with them, and they will pay us less attention.

First and foremost, your talk is a conversation with your audience – not with PowerPoint. You should know your material well enough (and have good enough notes) that looking back at your slides is all but unnecessary. (I do check my slides periodically to see that things are running smoothly, though.)

Now, in Mr. Gore's defense, during the video, it does sound like this talk was prepared very hastily. This is probably a case where he has to lean on his slides some because of short preparation time. Still, when you know you have a talk coming, and you have ample time to prepare, prepare well, so your eyes can connect with your audience rather than remain glued to your slides.

Tags: al gore, TED, examples, connections, speaking

I'm not a fan of logos plastered over every slide in a presentation. Imagine how much different an Apple press event would feel if their slides looked like this:


Just in case you forgot whose event you were at.

Even at talks given within my own school district, I've seen presentations where our township logo appears in the bottom corner of every slide. This is totally unnecessary clutter, and it makes your slides feel generic and impersonal. Besides, your slides are not a marketing avenue. Your audience should not feel they are watching a feature-length advertisement – even if you are pitching a product or service.

Now, don't get me wrong. Even Apple uses branding for their presentations, but it usually looks like this.

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Before the presentation formally begins, a solitary Apple logo will be present, and in-your-face branding will pretty much remain absent for the remainder of the talk. You don't need to be reminded whose products you are learning about. The slides remain clean of marketing, and the whole experience is the better for it.

If you prepare slides for a company, business, or other organization, avoid bombarding your audience with your corporate identity. Yes, use the first and possibly the last slide to display your logo, but keep the rest of the slides clear of unnecessary clutter. your slides are meant to reinforce your talk. They are not an advertisement.

Tags: conventions, clutter, examples, graphics

Through the character of Zaphod Beeblebrox, Douglas Adams once wrote, "I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I do not know the answer." How such wise words came from the two-headed, egocentric President of the Galaxy is beyond me, but there it is.

Have you ever seen a teacher, instructor, or presenter clearly talk around in circles after a question, and it's apparent that the speaker just plain doesn't know the answer? Have you ever been stymied by a question yet found yourself babbling through something that almost resembles an answer? I know I have (on both counts).

I think one of the toughest lessons in public speaking is that "I don't know" is an acceptable answer. Your brain has finite capacity, and you will miss things or forget things in your research and preparation. You don't have to save face by responding with an unsatisfactory answer.

In a presentation setting, try something like this: "That's a great question, but I don't think I can give you a good answer right now. Can you give me your email address, so I can contact you later?" Assuming you follow through, you avoid looking silly, you buy yourself some time to supply a good answer, and you give the issue closure.

You don't know everything, and you can't fool your audience into thinking you do. If you get a question that you don't know the answer to, think back to our friend Zaphod.

Tags: conventions, speaking

Don't think I'm giving into ads yet by the look of this banner to the right. I saw this ad staring at me today, and I thought, "There's something wrong here, but what?" Then it came to me: What should this lady care about impressing her in-laws? Honestly, she has to be around 50, and she has likely been married to her husband for quite some time. If she hasn't impressed her in-laws yet, she never will!

Seriously, though, this is a perfect example of just plugging in an image to have an image – which we can be guilty of in our slide presentation all too often. In this ad, would it have not made sense to have chosen an image of a twenty-something man or woman, perhaps looking somewhat self-conscious? Our self-assured woman in late midlife simply fails to reinforce the statement made in the advertisement. Forget about impressing your in-laws with taxes! How about you go and visit them more than three times a year? That will impress them even more!

As we design our slides, it is common to want to use images to reinforce what we are saying. (In some cases, we may feel the need to reduce negative space, but we should really resist that particular urge.) Unfortunately, if we don't respect the time it might take to select the right images, we may end up with pictures that merely feel tacked on – pictures that fail to really reinforce our message.

Let's return to some slides on conservation. In the two slides below, which seems to create the greater impact?

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Both slides emphasize the visual nature of the medium, and both use high quality images. However, the first slide, while very nice, fails to make a connection with the subject. The second actually illustrates the topic. The second slide forges a stronger connection between the subject matter and the audience.

When choosing images for our presentations, we shouldn't just plug something in to fill space or because it creates a certain effect. We need to make sure the images are meaningful to the topic we are presenting on.

PS: Now that I think of it, the woman in the ad may be the in-law in question. Unfortunately, the way the ad is laid out, it still looks life she is the one making the quote.

Tags: graphics, eye candy, clutter

In the previous post, I made the statement that your slides are not the handout. All to often, we walk into a presentation, and we are handed a packet that is no more than a copy of the presenter's prepared slides with lines along the side for taking notes. (Does anyone actually use those lines?) In other words, you get something that looks like this:

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Boxes and lines do not an ideal handout make.

I firmly believe that handouts are important – especially when the aim of the presentation is some kind of professional development as my example is. However, this approach to handouts fails on a couple of levels.

• Slides are not documents. Your slides are not your conversation. Even if you practice Death By PowerPoint, every important detail will not end up on your slides. You are cheating your audience out of the full content of your presentation by substituting a meaningful document with slides that do not convey the whole story.
  
  
• Nothing is left to the imagination. You just gave away the ending ... and the beginning and the middle. You haven't given your audience a visual aid to help them pay attention. You just handed them a checklist that allows them to keep track of just how close you are to the end. Also, if you get rushed and have to skip slides (a cardinal presentation sin in and of itself), your audience will know.

Slide printouts are a waste of paper. Better to have no handouts than something that killed helpless trees for no reason. If you are going to have a handout with your presentation, make it meaningful and helpful. Create a document that is separate and apart from your slides to be handed out after your presentation is completed. (This way the audience can focus on you rather than sheets of paper.)

Below, we have two alternative methods to preparing our handouts – each appropriate to different situations.

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Now we're getting somewhere.

The first example is the best solution in my opinion. It is a standalone document that covers all of the material in the presentation. A more involved example of this would be the handout for ICE2006 on my Presentations page. These documents are wholly independent of the slides and make for good reference even long after you give your talk. The downside is that these documents require additional planning and time investment. If your handout is going to be a comprehensive document, you need to budget the preparation of that document into your schedule.

The second example is an annotated slide printout. I exported my slides as images, and dropped them into my notes. After some cleanup, making sure all text lined up with the appropriate slides, we have a serviceable handout. While less ideal than a standalone document, this solution will allow you to create a thorough handout in slightly less time. Again, though, hand this out after you have finished talking.

Hopefully, next time you prepare a presentation, you will think about investing some time in preparing your handout. Pages of little boxes with tiny type are not the best solution for communicating your ideas in print. Instead, work on an independent document that clearly communicates your conversation with the audience. Failing that, at least create a set of annotated slides that communicate more of the information than a simple printout.

For more reading on handout preparation, see these posts on Presentation Zen:

• "Slideuments" and the Catch-22 for Conference Speakers
• Handouts Can Set You Free
• Presentation Documents and Writing for Non-Writers
• The Sound of One Room Napping
• Using Annotated PPT Slides as "Handouts"

Tags: handouts, conventions, garr reynolds

Slides are often misused as a guided outline for note-taking or as a substitute for our own notes. As presenters, we let our slides become a crutch, and, instead of our slides providing a visual reinforcement for our topic, we let them simply spell out exactly what we are saying word-for-word.

Below is a slide from a Intel business presentation. Now, I don't know the exact context of this slide, but it does provide a nice example of some of the traps we fall into when creating our own slides – creating walls of unreadable and overly detailed text.


Behold the wall of text.

Now I don't know about you, but I can't read those bullet points without really straining my eyes, and I imagine that anyone sitting in an auditorium or conference room would have the same problem. The slide is just overloaded with text, and I can just hear the presenter saying exactly what is on the slide verbatim.

How can we approach this differently? In this case, I think adding slides will actually help. I'm going to take a part of the second bullet point, and turn it into two independent slides. The first will introduce the Core 2 Duo processor, and the second slide will reinforce the fact that these processors are shipping ahead of schedule. (That struck me as an important point.)

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The initial build shows the logo for Core 2 Duo, and the presenter can extoll the benefits of this advancement. Perhaps even some highlights appear next to the image. Then those highlights fade away, and the Core 2 Duo Extreme appears. Core 2 Duo may disappear, and highlights of the Extreme edition can appear to the left.

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The second slide shows a desktop calendar with the date of July 27. That's when the Core 2 Duo was supposed to begin shipping. The date fades out, and the slide reveals that Intel is ahead of schedule.

While far less detailed, this second set of slides succeeds at visual communication where the initial slide fails. Our slides do not have to serve as subtitles to our voices. Remember, slides are supplementary visuals to the presentation. They are not your notes. They are not the handout, and they are most certainly not the presentation itself You are the presentation. Your slides should serve to support you, not supplant you.

Tags: text, readability, examples, makeover, clutter

I've seen way too many keynotes, seminars, and presentations now, and I've seen a ton of introductions. If you are at a keynote of some kind, the keynote speaker is usually somehow formally introduced. ("Our speaker today is known for..." or "Ladies and gentlemen, Insert Name!") If it is something smaller scale, you may get a one-sheet introducing your speaker, or you may have the speaker introducing him- or herself. ("...I want to wish you the best of mornings and tell you how truly fortunate I feel...") Once in a while, you get a presenter who wants to play some kind of get-to-know you game, but those shall not be spoken of here.

The video mentioned in my prior post has Steve Jobs being introduced by another speaker, and it distracted me because this is so unusual for Mr. Jobs. The usual Steve Jobs intro goes something like this: Lights dim; Steve Jobs walks out, says, "Good morning. Thanks for coming. We have a lot of great announcements today, so let's get started," and the presentation begins. That's it.

Your introduction will make an early impression on your audience. In my experience, respectful but concise is a good idea. You've acknowledged your audience and have expressed appreciation for their presence, but you're not going to waste their time either. There's not much more an audience appreciates than a presenter who avoids wasting time.

Tags: steve jobs, examples, conventions, time use, impression, connections

If you visit my Links Blog, you recently saw yet another Presentation Zen entry I linked to. Again, Garr Reynolds writes about Steve Jobs, but, instead of focusing on a modern example of Steve's speeches, he rewinds back to 1997 and looks at the day Steve Jobs returned to Apple's Board of Directors.

Days then were dark for Apple. They were bordering on irrelevancy and financial failure, but the momentum began to change when Steve Jobs reclaimed the MacWorld stage in the summer of 1997 to immense enthusiasm, but he brought a very unwelcome announcement in his wake.

Apple would have a $150 million investment from none other than Microsoft. In recent history, with the friendly (and sometimes less than friendly) barbs Apple shoots at the Redmond giant, it's hard to imagine a time when Apple would need to turn to the company that seemed to symbolize everything that was wrong with the technology industry, yet it happened. In August of 1997 Microsoft purchased $150 million of non-voting Apple stock; the two companies entered into a cross patent agreement; Microsoft committed to at least five more years of Mac Office, and Apple made IE the default browser on Macintosh computers.

The audience went wild ... but not with enthusiasm.

In the video, the developers in attendance actually began jeering and booing while Steve Jobs was talking about the partnership. The man who could barely introduce himself among the cheers that greeted his arrival onstage now had problems getting two sentences out of his mouth without some form of hostile reaction from his audience.

Through it all, Steve kept his cool. His tone was very matter-of-fact. He was not messing around, but neither did he shoot back at his now hostile audience. Presenters sometimes end up in front of hostile audiences such as this, but the important thing is to, like Steve, keep our cool. Remain professional. Stay on task, and do not let yourself be derailed into justifying yourself or firing back at the nay-sayers.

Check the video out. It's about 40-minutes long, and you can find it right here.

Tags: steve jobs, examples, connections

Seeing the growing number of posts in the Presentation Tips section leads to an excellent question: What's the point? What does it matter whether your slides are aesthetically pleasing or not? The status quo works fine, why try changing?

I think the answer is simple: anything that fails to enhance your overall presentation will only detract from it. For example, I was just recently in the audience for an excellent presentation geared toward helping teachers improve the methods they use to teach. Outside of a few unnecessary buzzwords, the material was fantastic. However, the presenter's slides did nothing to reinforce the message, and I found myself silently wishing she would just give up on PowerPoint entirely. Her overall package was fantastic, but the stoic and bullet-laden slides did nothing but detract from the times she was presenting engaging material.

If you are taking the time to put together a "PowerPoint" for a talk you are going to give, then it is worth the time to do a good job at those slides – not because you are going to use your slides in place of notes, (we'll talk about that in another post) but because you want your slides to impact your audience and strengthen the message you have.

Below, I have two slides geared toward environmental activism – dealing with rainforest conversation. I've prepared them following very conservative guidelines, and no one would be surprised by what they see.

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These slides are perfectly nice, and they do a fine job printing out exactly what I'm saying. The problem is that they do nothing to add to my message. All they do is restate the information.
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To maximize the impact of our presentations (excuse me for bordering on buzz-wordiness), we want slides that somehow add depth and substance to our talks. Our slides should not be mere subtitles to our speaking. What if I talked about the exact same material presented on the above images, but slides like the ones below were playing while I was talking?

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Which slides catch your attention better? Which will have a stronger emotional impression on the audience? (After all, a presentation like this would be trying to stir people to some kind of action. Therefore the emotional factor is very important.) Instead of simply reiterating my points, the slides are now reinforcing those points. They are making the information tangible and real.

Very quickly, consider one more approach. What if my slides consisted only of high-resolution images that scrolled by while I was talking – no titles, bullets, or any text at all. How would that affect my speech? What if the running images lined up with the topic I was on (animals, plants, water, medicine...)? The possibilities are staggering.

Slides are often viewed as mundane, and audiences either pay attention to the speaker and tune the redundant slides out, or they focus on the slides and tune the narration out. The challenge is compose your slides in such a way that they help you captivate your audience and make them enthusiastic toward and involved with the message you are attempting to deliver. That is why good slide design is important for presentations that work.

(For those interested, my quick research on rainforests was done on these two sites: Rainforests: Wikipedia & Nature.org.)

Tags: philosophy, impression

Sometimes we want our presentations to be more colorful than the standard subdued grays, whites, and blacks. Often, unfortunately, the use of more bold colors in a presentation often leads to something that can make your audience's eyes cry out in pain. Too often, I've seen (and I bet you have too) slides that are just plain difficult to look at because of the way color is abused.


Try staring at this for 60 seconds without blinking.

Unfortunately good color resources can cost a lot of money, but here is a way to gather some good color ideas without spending anything (provided you already own a scanner).Go to Lowe's paint department, and look for the American Tradition display. All along the display of color samples are tiny little booklets called "Color Ideas." The first neat thing about these booklets is the explanation of monochromatic, complimentary, and analogous color schemes.



The other aspect of these booklets I like is that they have sample color schemes that show an example of complimentary, monochromatic, and analogous (as well as pictures of rooms decorated in the selected colors). Below is one of the sample color selections from a booklet.



So how do I use these? First, I scan them and crop them down to what you see above – just the bars of colors. These color bars are stored in iPhoto, and I can use Apple's system color picker to choose one of the colors in the image. (To invoke Apple's color picker in any application, use the keyboard command "Cmd-Shift-C.") This allows me to use these color schemes as templates for any document or presentation I am working on.


The color picker in action.

In addition to these schemes, you have a color wheel built right into the color picker, and this allows you to look for your own analogous, monochromatic, or complimentary colors for your slides.

After tweaking the layout of the slide and adjusting my selected colors just a hair, the final result is hopefully much more pleasing than the slide that opened this entry:



Color is a powerful tool – it is emotional and impacting. However, color can also be distracting if used incorrectly. Here is just one way to use some free resources to make batter use of colors in your documents and presentations, hopefully helping you make a better impact when you use slides or handouts to facilitate visual communication.

Tags: colors, makeover, how-to

When you make a document or a presentation, the font you choose is a form of communication. Unfortunately, I have seen many examples of a chosen font communicating a very different mood or feeling than the material is intended to generate.

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In the two slides above, the first is displaying its information in Chalkboard, a font very similar to the overused Comic Sans. The second slide is using Copperplate. Which font communicates the mood of the material more precisely? Chalkboard has friendly rounded letters and looks very casual and easy-going. Copperplate is a much more formal looking font.

These slides present material about a very serious topic. Therefore, a serious font should be used. Next time you are creating a presentation, take note of what font you are using. As mentioned in prior posts, make sure you are using an easy-to-read font, but, along with this, be sure that your font does not detract from the larger message of your presentation.

Tags: font use, text

Sometimes, you just can't avoid a long sermon. Many of my cousins are gospel preachers – very good preachers – and one of them just made a short blog post about a very long sermon he recently did that covered recent interest in the DaVinci Code. The sermon lasted 62 minutes.

In my first post about Breaking Rules, I noted that Vincent van Gogh is not considered a great artist because of his strict adherence to all the rules. In fact, the case is quite the opposite, and I would surmise that many members of the congregation my cousin preached at hardly felt the extended time period despite the 10-20-30 rule.

So how do you present 62 minutes of material and keep it engaging?

Stay Focused: The length should come from a wealth of material – not because you are busy chasing rabbits.

Stay Energetic: If you appear bored or fatigued with yourself, you are doomed. (I'm having a terrible flashback to a certain lesson about Genesis 1+2 back at TP, for those of you who know of what I speak.)

Keep It Moving: Avoid spending 45 of the 60+ minutes on one point. (Whoa, same flashback...)

Keep It Real: Use material that is current and relevant. The topic of my cousin's sermon is a great example. Make sure the material has a hook that will maintain engagement.

Don't Mention It: Avoid warning your listeners. "Today's lesson is probably going to be 12 hours long." No. You know you accomplished your task if few are aware of the elongated time period.

Don't Make It a Habit: You can only get away with this so many times.

Remember, human attention dwindles quickly, and you, as a speaker, need to put extra effort into maintaining that attention if you know you will be speaking for a long time. As for your slides, the guidelines don't change – you will just end up with more than 10. With the right material and the proper planning, long sermons can be effective.

Tags: sermons, time use, 10-20-30

In my last post, I touched upon the fact that preachers should try to follow the 10-20-30 Rule as much as possible. Now, Mr. Kawasaki's rule is specifically geared toward business pitches, and he lays out a simple 10-point list of how your slides should flow in this setting.

Whether you want to think of it this way or not, sermons are very similar to pitches. You usually start with a problem (i.e. divorce rates). You propose a solution that typically includes scripture references, and you conclude with a call to action.

In this post, I'm going to put together a sample 10-slide sermon as a model for what a 10-20-30 sermon presentation might look like. This lesson is about divorce, and it will follow a "3-point" outline with an introduction and summation.

Slides 1 & 2: Introduction & Statement of Problem

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While the lesson is being generally introduced, slide 1 is visible. I would start without the text and have it appear while I'm working up to the problem. Slide 2 is very simple, clearly pointing out the problem that about half of US marriages end in divorce. Now, I can list some other relevant statistics if I wish (like trending, broken home violence, etc.) , but they don't all need to be enumerated on the slide because they are all secondary to that figure.

Slide 3: The Solution

The solution is presented upfront. The way to handle the problem of divorce begins and ends with respect: respect for marriage, respect for one another, and respect for God's word. At this point, I don't build all three of those points onto the slide. The slide merely opens with "The Answer?" and I build in "Respect" once I am ready. I don't want the congregation to get ahead of me. Details should not be revealed until the speaker is ready.

Slides 4-9: Details and Scripture

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The first point of our sermon focuses on respecting the institution of marriage. We start with Genesis 2:24 (on slide 4) where a married man and woman are described as one flesh. From here, I can refer to related scriptures about oneness such as Deuteronomy 6:4 and briefly compare it to Ephesians 5:31, but the slide remains focused on Genesis 2:24. Slide 5 centers around Hebrews 13:4 describing marriage as honorable. At this point, it might be wise to glance at Matthew 19 where Jesus says God joins the couple together.

The main point of these two slides is that God created marriage honorable and holy, and we should should respect what God has created.

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Slide 6 emphasizes the adultery that can result from divorce. The one initiating divorce is guilty of adultery, and he/she may have laid the path for his/her former spouse to commit adultery. Slide 7 talks about violence as the result of divorce, and I could speak a moment here about the numerous individuals affected negatively by a divorce. (Again, there is no need to list them on a slide. The congregation does not need to be spoon-fed information.)

The main point: If we really respect ourselves and others, we will sincerely seek other alternatives before divorce.

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Slide 8 remains with Malachi 2:16 and the fact that God hates divorce. That alone should be enough for us. On slide 9, Jesus is referenced as pointing out that there is no good reason for divorce (except for adultery by one's spouse).

The main point: As Christians, we should respect God's view of divorce and avoid it if possible.

Slide 10: Summation

Slide 10 merely serves to review the big points of the lesson and encourage the congregation to take marriage seriously rather than view it as something easily disposed of. If we have the proper respect for marriage as God made it, for each other, and for God's views on the matter of divorce, then we should work diligently to maintain the solidarity of our marriages.

Wrap-Up

Slides: 10. Practice run: 25 minutes. Fonts: 48-288 points. I also made sure the slides were in line with my previous post. We have built-in, emphasized text, no bullets, and no walls of text at any point. All images are high quality (and any image that had text atop it was reduced in sharpness to maintain the readability of the text), and our background is a heavy paper texture that looks similar to what you might see for a wedding invitation. Finally, the font is simple yet formal and easy to read.

Now I drafted this outline and these slides from scratch especially for this post. I even went to my favorite stock photography sites to find some new images, and used eBible for looking up scriptures and commentary. This took about three hours in all. I don't think thats an unreasonable amount of time.

Whether or not you agree with the doctrine of these slides, I hope you can learn something from this model. Our sermon presentations do not have to be derivative and mundane. With a little work, our slides can be a strong reinforcer of our message at an intellectual and an emotional level.

Tags: 10-20-30, sermons, examples, guy kawasaki

I'm sure many of you attend congregations with slide presentation abilities, and, along with these capabilities, you probably have slides running through the preacher's sermon. The sermon presentation can be a very different beast from a professional presentation, but some of the same principles apply. Here are some things to think about if you are planning a presentation to go with a sermon.

Do Follow the 10-20-30 Rule. If you don't know what I'm talking about: 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30-point font. If you are presenting a standard sermon, you should be able to fit everything in right around 10 slides. My longest slide presentation for a sermon comes in at 14 slides. My shortest has only six. Most sermons will break the twenty-minute mark, but you should definitely try to avoid breaking that thirty-minute mark. Finally, any text smaller than 30-points gets hard to read.

Do Use (Some) Built Text. Your average sermon will have numerous scripture references. Pick those scriptures most relevant to your point, and cite them on the slide. This can be helpful for those following along and for those taking notes. Have those scriptures appear as you get to them so the audience does not get ahead of you and disengage.

Do Use Images. I don't mean clip art here. Use quality images that reinforce your point, that create emotional impact associated with the topic.

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The first slide uses clip art and a business theme. Number two uses a stock image and an organic theme.

Do Use Themes. Choose a nice background for your slides. Don't make it busy or the color too bold– a simple texture should do – and avoid "business" themes. Use a background that has a natural feel about it. Textured paper or light stone should do.

Don't Overuse Transitions. Stick mostly with simple fades and dissolves. Save big transitions for big points, such as your summation. Too much animation will distract the congregation, and the message will become secondary to the show.

Don't Write Out Scripture. This is an easy one to fall into. If you have some words you want to pull out of a scripture, build those words onto a slide as you get to them in your reading. Don't just paste the entire scripture up there and highlight the words.

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The first has a lot of visual distractions. The second is much clearer on the main points.

I've seen preachers have three or more slides straight containing one long scripture reading. First, this practice creates walls of text that just get unreadable. Second, by the time you get through all the slides, the congregation has forgotten what was highlighted on the first slide. Build in the key words. Your point will be stronger for it.

Don't Use "Cool" Fonts. You want the congregation to be able to read the text you do put on your slides. Avoid neat-looking fonts that obscure legibility (and remember kids: 30-points or higher).

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The first makes me want to get my eyes checked. The second is much clearer.

Finally, be prepared to slip your slides in amidst other slides the congregation may be using – for standard announcements, song service, etc. When I occasionally preached at a congregation that used slides like these (and I wanted to use Keynote for my slides), I would replicate the standard-use slides, so my computer could be used for the entire service. Otherwise, I would switch to PowerPoint for the day. If you do want to use different software than the congregation traditionally uses, make it seamless. Don't put someone in a situation where they have to try and switch computers mid-service.

Hopefully these tips help those of you that present slides along with your sermons. Remember, if you are taking the time to make slides, then it is worth doing those slides well. Churches deserve good presenters as well!

Tags: 10-20-30, readability, eye candy, themes, sermons

On the Macintosh platform, there are two major choices for creating slide presentations: Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote. There are other alternatives, but many of these are basically identical to PowerPoint in interface and features.

Just like choosing an operating system, a digital music player, or even a pair of shoes, many objective and subjective reasons can affect the software you use to create a presentation. My personal preference is to compose my presentations in Keynote, and I thought I'd take a moment to write about why I prefer Apple's relatively young slide-ware application.

The Interface

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Keynote + PowerPoint

Quite simply, Keynote is much easier on the eyes than the Mac version of PowerPoint (which, incidentally, is nicer looking than the current Windows version). Keynote is a very elegant looking application that looks right at home on Mac OS X. It's interface is clean and uncluttered, doing little to distract from the main workspace. PowerPoint, on the other hand, can become a mess of toolbars and pallets. There is a lot of visual distraction going on here.

I also like how the slides are visually arranged along the side of Keynote's window. In PowerPoint, all I get is a bunch of text or slide numbers. To visually navigate my slides in PowerPoint, I have to change to Slide Sorter view. (Incidentally, you can view your slides this way in Keynote as well by choosing Light Table from the View menu. I didn't know that until recently.)

The Little Touches

Keynote produces nice looking results far more easily than PowerPoint. In the screenshots above, you can see a reflective effect under the image. No Photoshop was involved, nor did I have to invoke any tricky image reversal with alpha-masking techniques. How is this done? By checking a box that says "Reflection." Additionally, shadows are handled much more smoothly; transparency is fully supported, and there is a greater variety of 3D transitions available for Keynote.

Another big bonus in Keynote is the ability to mask images with various shapes rather than just cropping them. I have noticed, though, that you can "cut out" rectangles and circles in PowerPoint, but the tool is still no where near as flexible as Keynote's "Mask with Shape" ability.

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masking and aligning

When resizing a photograph or other imported image, Keynote maintains its dimensions by default – the entire image resizes proportionally, not just the side you are dragging, and Keynote shows alignment guides that help you see how your images and text line up.

Other Bonuses

Keynote offers many ways of sharing your presentation besides its native format. Flash, QuickTime, PPT, and PDF are among the options when exporting Keynote slides. Someone doesn't necessarily have to have Keynote to view my presentations. (In fact, Keynote is a good place to start if you want to make an iMovie project that contains a bunch of still images.)

Finally, Keynote works like a Mac application should. It talks to the other iApps seamlessly – the photos in the screenshot above ("Masking with a shape.") are all in my iPhoto library, and I can choose music from iTunes or iMovie projects I have saved. Furthermore, Mac-standard keyboard commands for aligning and formatting text, managing windows and documents, and opening up Apple's color picker all function properly. These commands can be hit-or-miss when using PowerPoint.

Conclusion

These are some of the reasons Keynote has become my presentation software of choice. It was quite a transition when I switched from PowerPoint, but it was definitely worth the effort. Keynote certainly lagged behind Powerpoint in terms of features for a couple of years, but, after only three versions, Apple's presentation program has matured into a great alternative to PowerPoint, raising the bar for what is expected of slide-ware applications on the Macintosh platform.

If you have access to a Mac (like at a local Apple Store), I suggest you take Keynote for a whirl. You might be surprised what you can do with it.

Tags: keynote, software

Once you pick the theme your presentation is going to follow in Keynote or PowerPoint, you are offered a selection of templates to choose from. Bulleted list, text with image, graph with title and text – these are those slides that are already laid out for us. All we have to do is plug in our information.

In the middle of these selections is the mysterious "blank" slide. It offers no guidance. You can't "click here to enter clip art." It doesn't tell you where to put your bulleted list. It is an enigma, but it can also be your best friend.


Does this slide intimidate you?

The blank template offers us unlimited creative potential, but, like the writer's blank page, it can be daunting. There is no obvious place to start, no guidance in placing graphics, headers, or text. The slate is blank, but this can be an exciting place to be.

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The slides above provide a simple contrast. The first slide uses a template for title, bullets, and photo from Keynote's White theme. I followed the template exactly, making no alterations except for shrinking the title's font size a little. The second slide is made with White's blank template. The freedom provided allows for a more visually interesting presentation of the exact same material. Did it take more effort? Yes. Was the result worth it? I think so.

(Secret: Most of my own presentations primarily use blank templates. See this post from earlier this month for an example of how drastically the "blank template" approach can change a presentation.)

Next time you have a presentation to give, challenge yourself, and see what you can accomplish using only the theme's blank template. You might surprise yourself with how much fun you have preparing your slides, and your audience will notice the difference.

Tags: conventions, prep

Conventional wisdom places quite a bit of text on slides. Even I catch myself transferring my outlined notes to my slides pretty much word for word occasionally. The result is mundane slides that contain walls of text. Your audience ends up reading more than listening. This is standard practice, I believe, for two big reasons:

• We don't want to leave anything important out of our slides.
• It makes printing a handout simple.

Sometimes, though, too much text can get in the way and take away from your message. Look at these two slides below. They are virtually identical, but they use their text very differently to get the point across:

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Which slide stirs your curiosity more? Which feels more impacting? The same important statistic is represented on each slide. In the first, it is surrounded by a bunch of other stuff making a complete sentence. Furthermore, it is likely that two or three additional points will accompany this point, relegating it to near obscurity by the time the clicking is done.

In the second, the stat is naked and unhidden. No one will question the point of this slide. Additionally, the second slide requires you to fill in the context and additional information. You have not relegated yourself to unimportance with this slide, nor will your audience be able to skim the information and zone out. This slide provides a fact, and you are there to fill in the rest of the information.

In general, I advise against using complete sentences on your slides. Sometimes it is necessary, but look for those cases when single words or short phrases can get the point across more concisely. Along this same vein, avoid paragraphs of text. The proverbial "Wall of Words" does not make for good slide layout and may become frustrating for those trying to pay attention to you while taking in all the information on your slides. In the case of text, less is more, and simpler is smarter.

Tags: conventions, readability, text

Text color can be a tricky thing in presentations. We want to be somewhat color-coordinated when we assemble our slides, but sometimes we create text that blends in with those slides as a result. It's not unusual to see, for example, darker blue text on a light blue background. In the images below, the first picture is the theme default for text color in Apple Keynote's Watercolor theme. In the second image, I've merely changed the text to black.





Sitting at your computer, the first example picture is not so bad, but imagine trying to read it in the back of a 400-seat auditorium or even the back of a standard classroom. See, contrast is important.

Unfortunately, we can sometimes make grievous errors in regards to contrast. Take a look at the next two examples:





The background is darker in these examples, and the text definitely contrasts the background in our first picture. I don't know about you, but that hurts my eyes, though. I've seen this more in PowerPoint than in Keynote, but it can be fixed by simply changing the text to a neutral color – white in this case.

In general, black and white are the best choices when putting text on slides. Yes, color is nice on occasion. My slides on attachment use colored text in small doses as do two of my sermon presentations. However, when playing with color, it can be easy to make your slides harder to read. When in doubt, use black on light backgrounds and white on dark, plain and simple.

Tags: colors, readability

One of the most common slides we see in presentations is the dreaded "About Me" slide (or some variation thereof). It's the part of the presentation where the audience effectively shuts their brains off and waits for the presenter to get to his or her point. If the presenter is lucky, perhaps half of his or her audience will re-engage once the "About Me" section is complete.

At ICE, we presenters had a 45-minute budget to work with. Every presentation I watched had at least one slide devoted to "About Me." Now, in this setting, it is nice to know a little bit about who you are and where you are coming from, but one team spent 15 minutes on who they were! They spent 1/3 of their time budget off topic, and, quite predictably, by the end of their session, the team was rushing to get through the prepared material.

Why do we add "About Me" slides? Is it ego? I don't think so. I think we feel the need to talk about ourselves so our audience understands why we are qualified to talk about our given topic. We want our audience to have confidence in us as presenters. Unfortunately, the "About Me" slide is still adds nothing to your presentation and may serve as a detraction to the product as a whole.

• Qualifications do not make for a good presentation. Remember the people with 15 minutes of background and qualifications? Their material was blah. It had only marginal practical value (at least in the way they presented it), and they offered little other teachers could build on. Who you are matters nothing if you message is broken.
  
  
• Your audience doesn't care. Your audience is there because they want to hear what you have to say about your topic – not about yourself. If you speak well enough, and your audience connects with your message, then they will connect with you. As a result, you may find some people who want to get to know more about you after your presentation is completed.
  
  
• Your audience may already know. This is the opposite of #2. How ridiculous would it look for Steve Jobs or Al Gore to begin a presentation with a serious, in-depth "About Me" section. The fact is, if you have a reputation in your field, people WILL come because of who you are. If that is the case, why bore them with stuff they already know?
  
  
• It detracts from the whole. Again, you want your audience to be captivated by your message. You want them to be enchanted. Every minute you spend off-topic or on mundane details is a minute that your audience is losing its collective interest. In addition, every minute you spend off-topic is a minute less you have to spend on your topic.

I know that the "About Me" slide is almost a standard in presentations, but resist the pressure. Don't do it. Leave the "About Me" for your website (and make sure your URL is on the handout your guests receive). Make your presentation about your topic and nothing else.

Tags: avoid, time use, conventions

As noted in my last update, I've uploaded a new version of my crusty old presentation on Reactive Attachment Disorder. The RAD presentation was given long before I began studying presentation design or discovered the blog Presentation Zen, and it is a fine example of average (read: poor) presentation design.

The original presentation was 29 slides long, and some slides had up to eight bullet points on them. I can't even begin to count how many bullet points there were in that original slideshow. The new presentation is only 14 slides, and, while there is still a lot of reading in some areas, the text has been simplified and streamlined in many slides.

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These two slides above have the same purpose. They demonstrate an attachment theory grouping of children into three categories. This presentation focuses on the second – detached – and the behaviors associated with that group. In the revised slide, imagery is much more important to the message. Notice how the faces compliment the headings above them. The middle image fades blue while the other two go out of focus, reinforcing the emphasis of this presentation.

I went on to outright omit several slides in the previous presentation that went into detail about the other categories. That information distracts from the focus. Unnecessary or peripheral information should never be included on your slides.

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The points made on the first slide are summarized on the new slide. (This in turn allowed me to combine two slides into one slide for the revision.) When inserting text points onto a slide, look for redundancies and restatements. How can your points be made more succinctly? With the new slide, I can still say everything I did with the first, but the visual emphasizes a simplified view of the whole message.

It's worth noting that, because the "bullets" do not match my words exactly, I chose to build each column in as a group rather than by point. In most cases, though, you don't want your points to ever get ahead of you.

As far as other differences go:

• Slide numbers were removed. Never number your slides.
  
  
• The background was simplified, and no pre-made slide designs were used.
  
  
• Text color is now used sparingly, and color in general is very regulated. Many images are grayscale or tinted blue. The only full-color picture comes on the last slide.
  
  
• It is now impossible for me to use my slides as a crutch and just read off of them.

Understanding RAD is the result of discovering that there is no one absolute way to prepare presentations. The original is exactly what someone might expect to see during a "typical" PowerPoint lecture. However, I hope that revising the slides will provide a fresher, more engaging experience when I give this presentation agan. Presentations don't have to settle for average. Challenge yourself when creating your slides, and see how you can improve your presentation.

Tags: makeover, readability, slide count, examples

Earlier today, Macintalk posted an article regarding web browser performance on Mac OS X. The write-up is an interesting read, and you can find it right here. I couldn't help but notice that their graphs were created using Keynote's excellent Storyboard theme. However, one of the graphs distracted me, and I've reproduced it here.



This theme makes liberal use of Keynote's high quality shadows, and the shadows are enabled by default when you insert a table like the one seen above. It looks very pleasing, but a serious issue comes up when one tries to read the text below the graph. The shadow is obscuring the text. Now, Macintalk is not entirely to blame here. The author was not preparing an actual presentation, and this is the default location for the shadow.

Still, if I was going to present this at a technology conference or tradeshow, I would not want these shadows getting in the way of making my point. Fortunately, the solution is very easy. Using Keynote's Inspector palette, I can simply disable the shadow, or I can change its placement. Additionally, setting the text below the graph to bold will make it easier to read since it is smaller than 30 points.

In the image below, I tried to replicate the Macintalk slide as best I could quickly, and I made two changes. First, I set the text below the graph to bold. Second, I altered the shadow – decreasing its offset and changing the angel. The result?



Our table is still very attractive, and now everyone can read our text. We could still make some tweaks, but those two easy adjustments make the slide much more readable (and, if I worked for the OmniGroup, that would make me a very happy camper).

The basic lesson is this: Form is important in giving a presentation. Good slides make a good impact. However, do not let the aesthetic touches get in the way of your slides conveying your intended meaning. Look for confusing graphics and obscured text, and, if you find troublesome spots, simply fix them. After all, you don't want you audience squinting as the result of overshadowed text.

Tags: eye candy, readability, makeover, examples, text, clutter

Expressionist painter Vincent van Gogh is not considered a great artist because he adhered strictly to rules of perspective, texture, or color balance. His bold, provocative works are the result of creativity usurping the rules or art classes everywhere. Van Goh didn't just break rules in his paintings randomly, however. He seemed to have a intuitive grasp of knowing just when and how to defy convention in order to gain maximum effect.

This same principle carries over to effective presentation design. Most good presenters are aware of Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint – that is your presentation should be no more than 10 slides, 20 minutes long, and contain no font smaller than size 30. By and large, I can say I closely adhere to two of those three rules most of the time. Most presentations I have made for church have been 10-15 slides. My fonts tend to size in the high twenties to low thirties (the rule I'm not so good at), and, when rehearsed, most last twenty to thirty minutes.

In contrast to these, my presentation at ICE 2006 was 37 slides long. Why did I so fragrantly break the 10-slide rule? Quite frankly, the rule did not fit the situation. In this circumstance, it was appropriate to break a rule for the sake of impact. Was the presentation overly long? Not counting the Q & A section, I talked and demonstrated for roughly 30 minutes, and I had a 45-minute budget. Many slides flashed by in seconds to demonstrate an effect, and, in all, the entire presentation (in its final form) has only eleven "bullet points" (though no bullets are used).


Photo by Mylerdude on Flickr

Take one of my favorite presenters for example – Apple CEO Steve Jobs. A typical Seve Jobs Keynote (aka Stevenote) will last around two hours and contain roughly 150 slides. In fact, Kawasaki says Steve follows a 125+/90/60 Rule. Despite this, Mr. Jobs is practically the paradigm of good tradeshow presentation. His visuals are effective. Most of his demonstrations are carried out flawlessly – no BSODs here – and he uses text minimally but effectively. The 10/20/30 Rule is not entirely applicable to the situations he typically presents in, and he breaks the rule in a way that has an impact on his audience.

Even Guy Kawasaki, proponent of 10/20/30 used around 50 slides in his recent Art of the Start presentation at TieCon 2006. Why? The situation and style of presentation merited the additional slides. Despite the rather large deck of slides, at no point does Mr. Kawasaki feel longwinded or drawn-out in his speech. Even Garr Reynolds has a story of a time he used 285(!) slides in a presentation he gave about the Art of Presentations. If you are using your visuals effectively, your audience will not be aware of the number of your slides or how many or few of them remain. They will simply be engaged.

In this post, I've specifically tackled one rule of presentation design, and that is intentional. To go beyond this would create far too long of a post, but I may revisit this idea of rule breaking in the future. However, in order to break rules, we must first understand and respect the rules. I recommend reading Presentation Zen and the Presenting & Speaking category of Guy Kawasaki's blog for more tips. Additionally, you can see a small sampling of Steve Jobs' presentations right here. Anything worth presenting at all is worth presenting well, so take the time to learn some guidelines for creating your presentations. After that, you can find creative and meaningful ways to break those rules.

Tags: conventions, slide count, guy kawasaki, garr reynolds

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

• Blaise Pascal

Brevity is not an effortless achievement. Anyone can stand in front of an audience and ramble for thirty minutes. However, challenge him or her to make a meaningful presentation or speech in ten minutes or less, and your results may vary. Being concise and to-the-point will not result from minimal preparation. Rather, it stems from greater planning and practice.

In any public speaking situation, the challenge is to avoid padding your material with redundant or meaningless fluff. Sometimes this materializes as that one personal story too many, or it may be in the seventh slide of bar graphs. Perhaps it is found in the fifth slide of bullet points that basically retreads the same ground as the last four slides. In any event, engagement and interest has been lost, and the the audience is slowly glazing over.

How do we avoid meaningless filler? Simply put:

• Practice your presentation multiple times before you have to give it. Are there any sections that bore you as the presenter? Do you feel tedious at any times? If you are having these feelings, imagine how your audience must feel. Go back and rework areas of your talk that you feel are drawn out.
  
  
• Seek the advice of others. Before taking your presentation to your audience, share it with some trusted friends or colleagues. Ask them to help you find areas that might encourage your audience to disengage. Welcome their critiques. Not all advice may be useful, but outside perspectives will help you expose those trouble areas.

Don't assume that tedium is a necessary evil. Neither should you assume every detail is interesting to your audience. Voltaire is quoted as saying, "The secret of being a bore is to tell everything." Better that your material be fifteen minutes long while inspiring and engaging your listeners than thirty minutes long with a disengaged audience. Preparation and practice is essential for presenting in a meaningful yet concise manner.

"Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon."

• Mark Twain

Tags: prep, time use, atmosphere

So ICE 2006 has come and gone. I have to admit that being a presenter this year created for a very different experience than when I would just go as a normal attendee. Overall, the experience was a positive one, and I look forward to participating in similar opportunities in the future.

The Good

Presentation Zen: This site has been a major influence on my presentation style and slide organization. I have to give props to this site for being such a great resource.

iLife and Keynote: These applications have a great following in education and for good reason: they are simple to use and produce great results. The very fact that the word "iLife" was in my session title probably helped bring in a good group.

My Audience: They were attentive, and they asked great questions. A couple of questions encouraged some on-the-spot experimentation, and I ended up learning some new things about iLife and iWork as a result. (For example, did you know you could drop PDF documents into a Keynote slide to have them appear as graphics? Way cool!)

My Coworkers: Though none attended my session, other staff members and the administration at my school were very supportive and encouraging.

The Presentation Itself: There were no unexpected glitches during the session (save a CD that wouldn't import into iTunes because it was badly scratched). Keynote ran beautifully, and the demonstration was free of unexpected errors.

The Bad

The Apple Store Keystone: Yes, they came through in the end, but they were rude and aloof toward my wife. Apple, if you want new customers, your retail staff has to provide a better shopping experience for average people, not a similar experience to other computer stores.

Laptop Woes: I was ironing out technology kinks up to the day before the presentation. Way too stressful.

Learning Experiences

• Out of 39 slides, I had only 4 with any bullets. That was still too many. By the fourth iApp bullet list, things were getting way redundant.
  
  
• I needed to gab less and demo more. The demo felt like a slight afterthought. I also needed to have practiced the demonstration portion more.
  
  
• I am currently addicted to reflections. I'm sure I'l get over it eventually.
  
  
• An interactive QuickTime movie did not work well in sharing this project on the web. There was no progress indicator, and Firefox didn't seem to like it at all.

Conclusion

Again, things went well overall, and I'm looking forward to presenting again in the future. I have a lot to learn in improving my presentation skills, but this experience made for a good step in the right direction. Hopefully, more experiences will crop up in the near future.

Tags: my talks