Graphics
July 20, 2009 by Jerry
In the course of the past twenty years, I have posed one question to every one of the thousands of participants who have taken the Power Presentations program: “How do you feel about presenters who read the words on their slides verbatim?” I have also posed the same question to the countless business men and women who have sat in the audiences of other people’s presentations. Not a single one of them has said that he or she likes the practice. Their responses, usually accompanied by expressions ranging from disdain
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May 1, 2009 by Pearl
The first time I watched one of Professor Lawrence Lessig’s presentations, it reminded me of Sesame Street; and one particular episode in which the main theme was a lesson about fruit. As pictures of various fruits, their text labels, and animated dancing characters flashed on and off the screen, the soundtrack bounced along with a lively song. The words, colors, and photos of the fruits and the lyrics of the song, were all as synchronized as an elaborate Pixar film. In Professor Lessig’s presentation, the words and photos on his slides were perfectly synchronized with his voiceover and they proceeded
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April 29, 2009 by Jerry
The Microsoft Office Online site offers users of PowerPoint 2007 a variety of graphical templates for download, one of which is to combine picture and text in one frame, as in the image above. I have taken the liberty of editing the image by reversing the position of the picture and the text as below. Feel the difference? Now let’s raise the ante by increasing the amount of text in each picture and text combination into four short bullets, as is often done in presentations. Feel the
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April 28, 2009 by Jerry
In yesterday’s post you read about the importance of the pause when introducing graphics—particularly animation—during a PowerPoint slideshow. Here’s a vivid example of how pausing helped that most mission-critical of all presentations, an IPO road show, and the case in point: Dolby Laboratories. I was privileged to coach the company’s CEO, Bill Jasper, and his executive team to develop their pitch to potential investors. We spent the better part of five days together focusing on every aspect of their presentation including the narrative structure of their story, the design and animation of their slides, and body language and voice of
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April 27, 2009 by Jerry
Mark Twain’s 19th Century adage, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” is applicable to 21st Century business presentations. What everybody talks about in business today is Microsoft PowerPoint, the medium of choice for presentations, and how to avoid making a visual hindrance of what is supposed to be a visual aid; how to avoid being guilty of the all-too-common opprobrium: Death by PowerPoint. Multiple Amazon listings, abundant bookstore shelves, countless web sites, and numerous state-of-the-art graphics studios, are all bursting at the seams with advice about how to design slides for presentations. Yet nobody is
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April 24, 2009 by Jerry
The default for building text in Microsoft PowerPoint—and the universal practice in presentations—is to dim the outbound bullet by turning it gray, making it almost disappear into the background, as if to say, “I’m done with that item.” Small problem: you’re not quite done with it; for it is still partially visible to your audience. If they should want to refer back to a prior bullet, they would have to squint to see it. A slight discomfort, but a discomfort nonetheless for your audience. Please click below and see the effect in animation: Get the latest Flash Player to see
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April 23, 2009 by Jerry
I am grateful to Geetesh Bajaj, and his excellent site, indezine.com, for last month’s feature story about The Power Presenter. It provided the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the site after a delinquent gap. It was particularly satisfying to read a recent article called “Show Me! What Brain Research Says about Visuals in PowerPoint,” written by Robert Lane and Dr. Stephen Kosslyn. Dr. Kosslyn chairs the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and his 35 years of research have focused on how the brain recalls visual stimuli in the form of mental imagery. In his article, Dr. Kosslyn provided scientific
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April 22, 2009 by Jerry
In yesterday’s post you read about how using Microsoft PowerPoint for both presentations and documents creates many inefficient variations of the latter: speaker notes, uniform messages, leave-behinds, and send-aheads. Hopefully, yesterday’s post banished send-aheads forever; today we’ll aim to do the same to speaker notes. A woman who is a senior engineering manager at a public telecom equipment company was one of the participants in a recent Power Presentations program. True to her technical nature, she wanted to be as accurate in her presentation as in her work; so when she headed up to the front of the room
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April 21, 2009 by Jerry
As part of our continuing quest to drive a wedge between presentations and documents, you read in yesterday’s post about how, in the pressured world of business, multi-tasking and repurposing are equated with efficiency. These practices result in the inefficient use of Microsoft PowerPoint for both presentations and documents—with multiple variations of the latter: speaker notes, uniform messages, leave-behinds, and send-aheads. Of all the many shortcuts the worst is the last: using PowerPoint for both the presentation and a preview of the presentation, as in “Send me your slides in advance.” The primary perpetrators of this duality are the solicited—the
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April 20, 2009 by Jerry
In May 2004, following the release of Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, I wrote an article for The Toastmaster magazine in which I took to task the critics who faulted the software for poor presentations. No less an authority than Edward Tufte, the well-known graphics guru and the author of The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, contends that “PowerPoint routinely disrupts and trivializes content.” That point of view, I noted at the time, is akin to blaming the Mont Blanc pen for illiteracy and illegibility. Disruption and trivialization of presentation graphics are the fault of the user. Five years and another release of
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