Being a closet design junkie, I happen to think good design is an essential part of creating anything – a website, a resumé, wedding invitations, birthday cakes, presentation slides, etc. The point is that design matters in visual communication, whether that communication be iconic, pictorial, typographic, or any combination of these. Thinking like a designer helps you be a better communicator in the long run.

Design, however, is not simply taking something and making it pretty. Good design is not about good looks. Good looks may result from good design, but this is not always the case.

Case in point: The Drudge Report is an example of good design that is not pretty. It's a site that is easy to use. It's visually distinctive, and it quickly communicates various messages through an organized clutter. Do I subjectively like the site? No, but I can't deny the design work behind it. Jason at 37signals has a great post about his belief that the Drudge Report is one of the best designed websites around.

Design is about communication. It's about uniqueness. It's about combining form with content. It's about changing how others think, and it's about connecting with others. Most of all, I believe, design is about caring. You care about the content for which you are designing, it shows.

A Couple Website Comparisons

Compare Apple's website to Dell's. On first glance, the layouts of their main pages are nearly identical. For me, it's hard to quantify exactly what makes Apple's page better. Is it the typeface? Is it the use of simple product categories rather than usage categories? Is it the absence of stock imagery? From my novice background in design, it's hard for me to say, but the Dell site feels more clinical.


It may be the snowman.

The difference is more visible when you visit a product page. For Dell, the product page is where they sell you stuff. For Apple, it's where they inform you. In fact, Apple's storefront is a separate part of the site.



Dell's product pages are cluttered with text, ads, and tiny product images. An Apple product page, in contrast, is full of large pictures of the product with small blurbs of text that will take you to more information. Dell's site says, "We care about you buying stuff." Apple's site says, "We care about our products." Of course, Apple wants you to buy their products, but their site allows you to get to know the piece of hardware or software you are buying first. This approach demonstrates a care that makes Apple's site stand out.

As if baiting the Mac/PC feud with the last comparison isn't bad enough, now let's look at the campaign pages for Barack Obama and John McCain. (I know I've been blogging about Obama a lot here lately, and I promise I'm almost done.) The Obama campaign site exudes attention to detail, and that same level of attention has been applied to Change.gov.



The team designing the Obama site pays careful attention to color use and font use. The layout is uncluttered, and the design team pulls off the difficult task of utilizing red, white, and blue without seeming patronizingly patriotic. The McCain site follows many of the same principles as the Obama site, but his site never seems to feel a unified whole. Cartoonish icons combined with a dark color scheme with obvious instance of stock photos. To misuse the Arizona senator's own words, it looks like someone phoned this one in.



Elections are about issues in my book, and the Obama team did a great job making it easy to quickly grasp and investigate the candidate's stances. Each issue page starts with a quick overview of Obama's plan in that area, followed by a table-of-contents and a comparison chat between candidates, followed by an extensive overview of Obama's plan, followed by a synopsis of his career record in that area. On the other hand, McCain's issues are presented as plain blocks of text. There's nothing wrong with this, but the care and work that obviously went into Obama's site makes it stand out.

The Lesson

I've been rambling about site design for the past several paragraphs, and you might be wondering what this has to do with presentations. Simply put, if you create your presentations around tired templates and merely plug in the requisite facts, you fail to differentiate yourself from the crowd. Adding care is a vital ingredient to standing out from the crowd. If you are speaking in public, talk about your topic like it matters. Design your slides like they matter. Good design is about caring. Caring is about something that matters, and if your talks mean something to you, they'll mean something to your audience.

Related Links

• Simply Robert: Branding a Candidate
• Presentation Zen: If you could recommend only one book (on graphic design)
• Presentation Zen: 2009: The year of "the designful company"
• Presentation Zen: 10 rules for making good design
• Webdesigner Depot: Designing Outside Your Comfort Zone

Tags: design, connections

Presentation Zen: Ichi-go ichi-e: this is the moment

Scaffolding on Benjamin Zander's fantastic talk at TED, Garr Reynolds pens a piece about living the moment and applying the principle to approaching presentations.

Here's the presentation that inspired this post:




Seth's Blog: The three laws of great graphs

After reading this post, I'm going to have to rethink my love affair with bar graphs. Click away for some good guiding principles when adding graphs to your presentation.

Tags: graphics, garr reynolds, connections

A good presentation tells a story. You are conveying a message to your audience in such a way that you hook them in and keep them interested in your given topic – be it reasons to use your product or service over someone else's or the techniques Egyptians used to mummify their dead. A presenters job is to relay that information in a way that leaves the audience not only informed, but longing to know more.

One of the more interesting mediums of storytelling/marketing in our culture is the movie trailer. It is a one-to-two minute vignette intended to give you an idea of what a movie is about while providing incentive to see the entire film. Some trailers go too far and basically spoon-feed the entire storyline to the audience (Free Willy, for example) while others just fail to convey anything attractive about the movie (like The Love Guru). There are a few, though, that capture the feel and tone of their source material perfectly and create a compelling package. One such trailer is the most recent for The Dark Knight.


"I see now what I have to become to stop men like him."

Stay On Message

This third trailer for The Dark Knight centers primarily around the character of the Joker, and it makes three main statements about him. (Alternately, my propensity for three point outlines perhaps biases me toward seeing this format!)


"Here's my card," and "You look tense."

The first point is simply that the Joker is in charge. The trailer makes it clear that he is the one calling the shots, and Gotham City is at his mercy. Secondly, the Joker makes his vendetta against order personal when he approaches the District Attorney's love interest, and finally we see that Joker's ultimate aim is to take down the Batman or become a martyr to the criminal element in the process. The preview hints at other plot points, but it only deeply explores the Joker and his anarchy.

The trailer stays clearly on message, and our presentations should do likewise. People leaving our sessions should have a clear picture in their minds of what we were covering. I've walked out of too many presentations where the speaker felt the need to cover as much as possible related to his/her topic in the given time. The result is always the same – a series of shallow, often disjointed points, with deeper information glossed over or rushed through. Decide: what three or four big ideas do you want your audience to walk away with? Focus on these.

Illicit a Reaction

My wife when she saw The Dark Knight's trailer: "I don't like that. Joker's just a terrorist. He's too evil." My response was one of goosebumps and fevered anticipation for the theatrical release. A good friend: "That was awesome." Every person I know who has seen one of the trailers for this movie has had a strong reaction. The trailer demands you react to it. The portrayals of Batman, the Joker, the nature of the crimes and conflicts – all of these force the audience to respond.

A good presentation does the same. Hundreds of talks have been given on global climate change over the past couple of decades. Why does Al Gore's illicit such strong responses? Why do thousands download videos of Steve Jobs' keynote speeches who would otherwise avoid business/technical presentations? Why does Richard Dawkins polarize audiences so much more than many others presenting similar material? Quite simply, these speakers demand reaction.

My wife (who loves visual arts) often tells me that a work of art is successful when it creates a response. It doesn't matter if you subjectively like the piece. What matters is that it garners reactions. Then the artist is successful. Likewise, you know your presentation is successful when you illicit reactions from the audience.

Leave Open Ends

Your presentation shouldn't only be informative, it should encourage your audience to want to go discover more for themselves. In the trailer for The Dark Knight, several hints are dropped regarding the character of Harvey Dent that should whet the appetite of any Batman fan.


"You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

Small bits of info heavily infer that this film will not feature one prominent villain from the Batman universe, but two. How will this fall from grace unfold? Will his alter-ego be a pivotal character, or will this movie merely introduce him? What will he look like as Two-Face? None of the trailers really answer these questions about Harvey Dent, but they don't have to. Just letting the audience know that there is more to be revealed is enough.

Don't feel you have to cover every last detail about the topic you are presenting. Stay focused. Inform the audience, but give them room to discover things on their own. Make them want to know more.

A good movie trailer makes you want to see the movie, plain and simple. It leaves the audience with a desire to discover "the rest of the story." Think of your presentations as trailers for larger concepts and opportunities for discovery. Tell a story that will illicit a response from your audience and make them interested in knowing even more. If your presentation was a movie trailer, would your audience be excited for the movie?

Tags: connections, impression, story

For some time, I've been wanting to write about Barack Obama, but I've had a hard time finding the correct angle. He is a modern phenomenon on the United States political scene, and much of his success can be attributed to his effectiveness as a communicator. Obama connects with his audiences in a way many other politicians find difficult. His supporters identify with him like few others. They don't speak of how "he" will do in the election. They speak of how "we" will do.

Take a minute (or twenty) to watch Senator Obama's speech on Super Tuesday, and notice the reactions he gets from his audience throughout.



After watching him speak a few times, here are some of the techniques I've noticed him use time and again in connecting with his audience.

Repetition. Like many great speakers before him, Barack Obama uses metered repetition as a way of driving clear messages throughout his speech. Garr Reynolds already has a great article about this very point that I hope you'll take a look at. The use of repetition gives your audience a clear anchor of reference throughout a talk, and your listeners more clearly remember the speech. It's a simple but powerful tool that cannot be overstated.

Spontaneity. Somewhere around 2:23 in the video, Obama, in response to someone calling out at him from the audience, says, "You know I love you back." He breaks down a barrier that usually exists between citizens and politicians with those simple words, and his audience responds energetically and positively towards the simple gesture. Most public figures would have ignored such an individual or perhaps even responded callously. Senator Obama takes such moments in stride, allowing for spontaneous give-and-take while not derailing the message he has prepared.

A Bigger Cause. Barack Obama speaks often in terms of movements and causes. While speaking of his own progress and successes, he diverts attention from himself and onto the larger picture he represents. In doing so, he solidifies his position all the more. He states that this campaign is not about "me," but rather it is about "you," and he delivers this in a convincing and earnest manner. His audience feels connected to history, and they see their involvement as something larger than just another political event. His audience feels connected to all that he represents, leading them to feel connected to him.

All political leanings aside, any speaker could learn much from watching Barack Obama in action. For more, take a look at his YouTube page: YouTube – BarackObamadotcom's Channel.

Tags: connections, barack obama, inspiration

Earlier this month, Seattlepi.com ran a comparative language analysis of Steve Jobs' and Bill Gates' keynotes for Macworld Expo and CES respectively. Simply put, Steve Jobs rated as the easier speaker to understand, and the site attributes this as a factor in Mr. Jobs' overall effectiveness as a speaker.

The language we use when speaking can either help us connect with our audience or distance ourselves from them. How many times have you groaned in a seminar of conference room presentation when something like this flits through the air?

We can phosfluorescently redefine out-of-the-box best practices before timely expertise and efficiently re-engineer inexpensive e-tailers with focused customer service. This allows us to enthusiastically synergize ubiquitous benefits for interactive methodologies.

In this, we credibly visualize integrated experiences through vertical best practices, giving us leverage to enthusiastically generate empowered technology and holistic total linkage and assertively redefine resource-leveling solutions via accurate potentialities.

bizarre buzz-speak courtesy of Corporate Ispsum

Speech like this requires so much time to digest and translate that the meaning is lost before it is reached. (To be fair, the above example is pure gibberish.) Kathy Sierra refers to one who speaks like this as a glib and as someone who should be ignored at all costs. Deep down, I think we already know this, and an audience is more likely to tune out a speaker following this pattern than engage him or her.

When giving a public presentation, think about how you are sating what you are saying. If you are using Microsoft Word to draft your talk, use the built-in Flesch-Kincaid readability scale. Easier to understand passages rate closer to 100 in Flesch Reading Ease, and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level gives you an approximation of the vocabulary level.


readability statistics in Word

Communicate clearly. Eliminate buzzwords, excessive acronyms, and unnecessary jargon from your speech. Think of how you would converse with the individuals in your audience, and take that approach to communicating your ideas. Remember, for anyone to connect with your presentation, they must first be able to understand it.

Tags: steve jobs, bill gates, language, connections

We are trained to expect walls between speakers and audiences. These walls can take many forms – notecards, lecterns, body language, even slides. Often, we don't even notice them, but they are there, creating barriers to our audience members being able to fully absorb the message of our talks.


image from stock.xchng

Look Up. Look Out. Staring down at notecards or back at slides creates a separation between speaker and audience. The speaker is not giving them his/her full attention. The audience will have a hard time giving undivided attention in return. When reading your talk, you tend to not sound interested, and you lose eye contact with with those you are trying to communicate. The only solution is to know your talk well enough that you don't need these aids. Yes, you should have notes if your mind blanks, but they should not be the primary focus of your attention.

Open Up. Body language is powerful. Keep your hands free. Walk around a bit while you talk. Smile. Avoid the humorous mistake of folding your fingers during a presentation No one likes being compared to Mr. Burns!

image by apple
Come Out in the Open. The lectern is a powerful barrier between you and the people in your audience. It's more than a psychological separation. It's a physical one. Standing behind a lecturn and staring down at notes is a convention of many veteran speakers, but it is not the best method of communication. Get out where your audience can see you. Just gaining the comfort level to discard this barrier will be a huge step in more closely connecting with your audience.

Too many public speaking classes actively promote these bad habits as "best practices." We are taught to hold notecards. We are encouraged to create crutch slides. We are trained to stand behind podiums, remaining stiff and formal as we present. However, tradition is not always correct. If we want to connect with the people in our audiences, we have to be willing to tear down those psychological and physical walls and expose ourselves to some extent. To make an impact, we must be open to being vulnerable.

Tags: atmosphere, connections, speaking

Time to dust off some old notes and finish this post! Way back in January, I talked about Stan Sigman's yawn-inducing contribution to the unveiling of the iPhone. At the time I wrote:

Mr. Sigman's talk was stiff and formal. It was basically read right off his cards, and it was full of corporate jargon and buzzwords. Mr. Jobs, in contrast, spoke passionately about his company's products. Any notes he might have had were fairly transparent, and he spoke in clear, easily understood language. Also, Steve Jobs kept things moving and kept the audience anticipating the next revelation about these products.

I think one of the most tedious elements of Mr. Sigman's talk was his use of (large) note cards. He actually started out okay, but then he whipped those cards out, and everything went downhill from there. You could almost hear the life being sucked off the stage. (It happens around 1:35:40 in the video for those of you playing at home.)

image from stock.xchng


I have to admit some bias. I have never used note cards (with one or two exceptions). Even in speech classes through middle school, high school, and college that required the use of note cards, I would just walk up to the front of the class with a handful of blank index cards – until I got busted and lost some points! Basically, even with my social challenges, I realized early on that reading a speech created a disconnect between the speaker and the audience.

Reading notes makes for stiff presentations that quickly lose the audience's attention, and the speaker ends up paying more attention to those cards than to those who have come to listen. Even "crutch slides" are preferable to holding notes in one's hands or staring down at a podium for the entire talk. Practice and preparation are essential to being able to speak without relying on notes. Yes, having notes accessible during your talk is a good idea, but they should only serve as a reference tool as-needed.

Breaking away from reading a speech may take some practice. You might catch yourself forgetting to include some information. You might make some mistakes, but the connection you gain with your audience is worth those hurdles.

Tags: impression, prep, connections

In a recent post, I wrote that presentations slides should primarily benefit the audience rather than the speaker, and the same is true of your talks in general. Occasionally, you go see a speaker because of something they've done or because of who they are, and you want them to talk about themselves. My wife and I seeing Jane Goodall a few years ago is a good example of this, but, in most situations where you or I might speak, our identity is secondary to the presentation. Because of this, our talk should be primarily about and for the benefit of our audience.


In many education conferences I've gone to, a standard presentation might include some tips about managing a classroom or teaching a topic but contain very few real examples of how these methods result in tangible results. The talk is purely academic about some good ideas the speaker has, but I don't walk away feeling particularly inspired. On the other hand, other speakers talk about some really awesome things they might be doing in their classrooms, but little to no information is given as to how the audience members might replicate these successes. In these case, I might feel inspired, but I have nothing concrete to build upon.

In this setting and others, the goal of presenters should be helping their audience members kick tail. As a speaker, I should be focused on how awesome I can encourage you to be. Audiences go to these conferences to improve themselves, so the speakers' focuses should be squarely on those who attend these talks. It's not about the cool things I've done as an educator (for example). It's about the cool things I've done, and here's how you can do it too. In this, talking about how you can be awesome should be the majority of the discussion – not how great I think I am.

If our audiences walk away feeling inspired and empowered to improve as individuals in their respective niches, we have succeeded as speakers. We should be storytellers, weaving tales of their potential successes. To begin on this path, though, focus has to come off of self and fall squarely on those individuals who have sacrificed time out of their lives to hear us speak. We owe them nothing less.

Tags: philosophy, connections

I was recently doing a quick makeover for some friends' PowerPoint presentation, and they noticed I simply deleted several slides rather than improving them. They were slides that said things like, "Q & A," "Discussion (10 Minutes)," "Break (15 Minutes)," "Lunch," etc. Some would introduce the person speaking. Another was an agenda. My friends questioned me about the removal of these slides, and I responded that they were gone because they aren't really relevant to the presentation.

To this, one replied, "Well, those are really there for us." This response got me thinking. Who do we prepare our slides for? How we answer this question will decide what we put on our slides.

If I prepare my slides for myself, then I will end up with walls of text that reduce the pressure to memorize my talk. I will use the slides to lay out the structure of my talk, so I remember where I am going. I will use bulleted lists to remind myself of my main points (often resulting in choppy non-conversational speech). In all this, I'm probably setting myself up to face away from the audience throughout my talk as I gaze at my own slides.


these slides are just for me, thankyouverymuch

In contrast, if we make our audiences the main priority, our slides will be far less cluttered. The information will be presented more clearly, and we'll use fewer words, larger fonts, and better imagery. If we focus on audience first, our presentation will have a much more natural feel and flow because we will be talking to the people in the room – not to a stoic set of slides.


these slides are more for you

Making a PowerPoint presentation has become such a rote practice in many fields, and I think we've lost the point. (No pun intended.) Visual aids are meant to help our audiences digest the information and make connections – they are not to be a speaker's crutch. Prepare slides if you must. I know I have an unhealthy addiction to Keynote. However, remember who you are preparing them for. When you are on stage, the audience is your world, and all of your preparations should go into enlightening and inspiring them with your presentation.

Tags: conventions, philosophy, connections

At the recent C4 conference, blogger DrunkenBatman, made a bold statement during his panel discussion: "Black people don't use Macs."


I have a feeling this is not going to go well.
original photo by rtmfd

Reactions by bloggers were mixed. Some criticized his approach (scroll through the C4 Twitter page for more) while others defended his character. I think Daring Fireball's John Gruber has a very good take on the controversy:

There’s a fine line between a moderator challenging his panelists (good) and ambushing them (bad). This came across as the latter; an unanswerable “Do you still beat your wife?” question...

...It was a mistake the discussion never recovered from. Audience reaction ranged from offended to embarrassed (and, by the end, bored). Much like a train, once a discussion like this falls off the rails, it doesn’t come back.

The fact is controversial statements may make your talk memorable. (After all, who can forget this slide once you see it?) Unfortunately, your talk may not be remembered for good reasons. Controversial statements can be polarizing, and they must be used judiciously.

I begin my talk about giving presentations by saying, "Most PowerPoint slides suck." While a little harsh, many audience members will nod in agreement and are now open to suggestions. However, if I said, "Chances are your PowerPoint slides suck," then I put the audience on the defensive. Often, we want to challenge the thinking of our audience, but we have to be careful not to cross a line that will alienate them from us.

DB might have been caught off guard by how many people took his statement as offensive and racist, but we are often not the best judges of our own material. I may not find something offensive, but a whole lot of others might, and Gruber is absolutely right. If a discussion or a presentation is derailed too hard by something someone says, recovery becomes very unlikely. The takeaway lesson? Simply think before you say something potentially offensive.

Tags: atmosphere, impression, connections

Even though Stephen Colbert is parodying Bill O'Reilly during his The WØRD segments, he also effectively improves on the format. Look at this contrast.

x

O'Reilly's screen is much more visually distracting, completely ignoring the fact that a viewer's listening capabilities are impeded when reading. The bullet point is one long sentence, and this distration is compounded by a rotating Fox logo and an ever-present news ticker. This is opposed to The Colbert Report which has a pretty clean visual style (purposefully similar to that of O'Reilly's), no ticker, and brief bullets that add to the presentation without distracting from it.

In a recent post, Garr Rynolds quotes John Sweller on verbal-textual redundancies:

"... It is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

By putting too much information on our slides – like bullet points that restate our words – we actually place obstacles between our audience and their full understanding of our presentations. The less your audience has distracting them, the more they can focus on you and your content.

Tags: text, examples, connections

We've discussed the length of our presentations in a couple of different posts now, but watching Stan Sigman deliver his talk during the Macworld keynote got me thinking again about length and audience attention span.


Every sentence read adds an hour to each minute...

The saying goes that time is relative. We save time, waste time, borrow time, and spend time. The minutes spent waiting in a doctor's office can seem much longer than the minutes spent playing video games at home. Mr. Sigman was on stage for all of seven minutes – seven very long minutes. When I checked the time in the podcast, I was surprised. I had expected to see him onstage for fifteen or twenty minutes. His talk really did seem that long.

Contrast this to Steve Jobs' portion of the presentation. The entire keynote was 1:45 long, and Mr. Jobs was speaking for all but about twenty minutes of that. Yet his portion did not feel as drawn out as Mr. Sigman's.


"I could talk for days, and you'd hardly notice."

What's the difference? I think a lot of it comes from my previous post. Mr. Sigman's talk was stiff and formal. It was basically read right off his cards, and it was full of corporate jargon and buzzwords. Mr. Jobs, in contrast, spoke passionately about his company's products. Any notes he might have had were fairly transparent, and he spoke in clear, easily understood language. Also, Steve Jobs kept things moving and kept the audience anticipating the next revelation about these products.

Timing is a very important part of your presentation. Sometimes shorter is better, but other times you may have to spend some serious time giving your talk. In either scenario, don't just be aware of the literal time, but ask yourself how long your presentation feels to your audience. Do you look and sound like you actually care about your topic? Are you keeping the flow moving? Is the audience anticipating your next points? If you can positively answer these questions, then relative time will work in your favor.

Tags: examples, time use, atmosphere, impression, connections

This is one of a few posts I have had gestating in my brain since watching Steve Job's Macworld 2007 keynote. By now, you probably know the products announced during the keynote, and you've possibly seen and/or read reaction to those products from various sources. However, reading and viewing commentary just doesn't have the same impact as watching Steve Jobs speak.



Throughout his talks, Mr. Jobs will demo his own products, but he does so with an enthusiasm that's contagious. He doesn't just share facts, figures, and specifications about the product – he shares excitement. He connects with the audience at an emotional level. He doesn't just say, "This product is great." He says, "This is why I think this product is amazing, and let me show you! Don't you think this is great?" He exudes passion for the products he is presenting, and that passion is contagious.


"Unbelievable."

Who else can make scrolling through a playlist feel revolutionary? Who else makes Google Maps and HTML email feel fresh and exciting? People notice Apple products (and are polarized by them) partly because of the man who evangelizes them the most – CEO Steve Jobs. You can't ignore how much he cares about his pitch. His enthusiasm and passion demand reaction, whether its positive or negative. The one thing you can't do is remain passive when he speaks.

What about your own presentations? How does your audience see you? Are you viewed as someone just presenting material that is expected to be presented in a totally mundane, dispassionate, and predictable manner? Are you excited about your topics? Do you communicate that excitement in your presentation? Passion connects. Passion engages. Be passionate during your talks, and your audience will respond with greater enthusiasm for whatever topic you are presenting about.

Tags: steve jobs, examples, atmosphere, impression, connections, 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?"

x

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?

x

x

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

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

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'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