Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“We don’t begin every new sentence in a conversation by restating our names, so why would you bombard people with your company logo on every slide?”

“Stories get our attention and are easier to remember than lists of rules.”

“Pablo Picasso said that “all children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.”

“If you need to put eight-point or ten-point fonts up there, it’s because you do not know your material. If you start reading your material because you do not know your material, the audience is very quickly going to think that you are a bozo. They are going to say to themselves ‘This bozo is reading his slides. I can read faster than this bozo can speak. I will just read ahead.”

“You can find inspiration in a million places, in a million ways—but probably not in your same old routine.”

“Symphony is about applying our whole mind—logic, analysis, synthesis, intuition—to make sense of our world (that is, our topic), find the big picture, and determine what is important and what is not before the day of a talk.”

“However, the presentation is about the audience, and telling them how nervous you are does not serve their interest.”

“The old adage is if they are laughing, they are listening.”

“Design is about making communication as easy and clear for the viewer as possible.”

“When you look at your slide, notice where your eye is drawn first, second, and so on. What path does your eye take?”

“In fact, said Carl Sagan, “As an inadvertent side effect, the pattern-recognition machinery in our brains is so efficient in extracting a face from a clutter of other detail that we sometimes see faces where there are none.”

“Many design tools in Keynote and PowerPoint are quite useful, but the 3D tool is one I could very well do without.”

“If it takes more space than a Post-it and requires more detail than a Sharpie can provide, the idea is too complex.”

“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”

“The biggest element a story has, then, is conflict. Conflict is dramatic. At its core, story is about a conflict between our expectations and cold reality.”

“Make the audience aware that they have a gap in their knowledge and then fill that gap with the answers to the puzzle (or guide them to the answers).”

“Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documentation.”

“but results are bad. This attempt to save time reminds me of a more fitting Japanese proverb: Nito o oumono wa itto mo ezu or “Chase two hares and get none.”

“Create a Document, Not a Slideument”

“The flip side of this is that if the slides can stand by themselves, why the heck are you up there in front of them?”

“does your computer function as a “bicycle for your mind,” amplifying your own capabilities and ideas? Or is it more like a “car for your mind” with prepackaged formulas that make your ideas soft?”

“Still, as John Maeda points out in The Laws of Simplicity (MIT Press), “In the field of design there is the belief that with more constraints, better solutions are revealed.”

“Making mistakes is not the same thing as being creative, but if you are not willing to make mistakes, then it is impossible to be truly creative.”

“No more than six words on a slide.”

“After that, it’s often too late for your bullet points to do you much good. You can wreck a communication process with lousy logic or unsupported facts, but you can’t complete it without emotion. Logic is not enough. Communication is the transfer of emotion.”

“Laughing people are more creative people. They are more productive people.”

“Focus, specialization, and analysis have been important in the Information Age, but in the Conceptual Age, the ability to synthesize seemingly unrelated pieces to form and articulate the big picture is crucial—even a differentiator.”

“Design starts at the beginning, not at the end—it’s not an afterthought.”

“it is more difficult to process information if it is coming at us both verbally and in written form at the same time.”

“This is an age in which those who “think different” will be valued even more than ever.”