slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations
Useful for inspiration when putting together a presentation. Felt like it scratched the surface of the topics it covered. Primary focus is on ‘presentations’ in the old-fashioned sense where someone is standing in front of an audience; made me realise that in my work we mainly produce ‘slideuments’ and I am not sure the book covered the contexts for when this is appropriate.
Too often, presentation software is used to create documents. Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen, calls these slideuments.
The audience will either read your slides or listen to you. They will not do both.
visuals devoid of clarity can cause a subliminal lack of trust. The presenter doesn't realize that the audience members care solely about what the presenter can do for them.
The amount of time required to develop a presentation is directly proportional to how high the stakes are.
If your message is “simplicity,” then your slides should feel simple.
“Studies have shown that design-oriented firms in all kinds of industries outperform their more-traditional peers–that design and innovation go hand-in-hand with financial success.”
When using images of people, make sure that they're looking at the content instead of looking away, or fleeing it.
Generally, any slide that needs to sacrifice whitespace to make room for content is packed too tightly.
Keep in mind that a slide's value is determined not by the amount of information it contains, but by how clearly it communicates its message.
Avoid adding photos or images to the background. It distracts the audience; they will try to process what the image is and why it has been obscured.
There isn’t much that turns my stomach more than seeing someone use a foot mark where an apostrophe should be.
“A good rule of thumb for font size is to divide the oldest investor's age by two, and use that font size.”
And in a pinch—say, the night before—when you have to Frankenstein a deck together at the last minute
the 10/20/30 rule for PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have 10 slides, last no more than 20 minutes, and contain no font smaller than 30 points.
If you must use more than 10 slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business.
Great verb!