BetterPresenting

PowerPoint Live Design Contest Ending July 1

Our annual user conference has a fun and storied tradition of essentially putting out for bid the designing of our conference slide template. We invite all comers to participate, with the creator of the chosen design being awarded with a free conference passport and round-trip airfare from a U.S. city.

All of the details are at the conference website, and they are worth reading. This is not a typical design project or audition, in wlhich one of the goals is to create pizazz and be noticed. This template needs to serve as a soft and graceful backdrop, in front of which our team of experts will prepare to showcase their own brilliance. It's an interesting challenge, and at the website, you can see how others have approached it.

And you've still got 10 days left. We'll close entries on Friday, Jun 26 (but we'll let you roll over that weekend until July 1. We hope you enter...and we hope to see you in Atlanta this October...maybe on our dime...

7,000 miles away...feels just like home

I am enjoying my first-ever trip to Scandinavia, having been asked by the Ministry of Trade and Industry in Norway to give a one-day workshop on presentation skills. It stays light until past 11p in Oslo this time of year -- which is just as well, seeing how it felt like I began the workshop at midnight, given the nine-hour time difference from California.

It was comforting to have found common ground with my northern European counterparts. When I began my introduction -- remarking on how most people learn PowerPoint in about 30 minutes and then declare themselves proficient -- many heads nodded with recognition, amid comments like "That's me" and "I know what you mean."

Too much text...slides doubling as printouts...templates too rigid...last-minute changes...misappropriation of animation -- I felt right at home addressing the same issues that my clients in the States wrestle with. Having said that, many of the slides that I saw showed very good instincts for blending words and imagery. Those tasked with creating content for the government clearly feel as if there is more to life than title, bullet, bullet, bullet. If I'm being honest, this sense was more evolved here in Oslo than back home.

Then, a few moments later, I would enounter a slide with four full paragraphs and underlines and red type for emphasis and I would be snapped back to reality. <g>

All in all, I am enjoying my visit here very much -- the people are gracious, accommodating, and full of life and spirit. They seem to know as much about American politics as we do, regularly wanting to engage in discussion about President Obama. And the seafood here is extraordinary.

I hope I'll be invited back...

Pretty Slides = Good Presentation...NOT.

Forgive the radio silence over the past four weeks; I have been busier than ever before. I was involved extensively with a defense contractor that I an not allowed to identify, a pharmaceutical company that I am (Bristol-Myers Squibb), a foreign country that I cannot name, and an upcoming trip to one that I can (Norway).

In all cases, I note two phenomena that have a potentially profound impact on how our professional community moves forward:

1) Few of my clients understand what the word "design" means.

2) Most of them equate the set of slides that they create with their "presentation."

I accept and forgive the first tendency; I bristle at the second. And together, they comprise a healthy challenge for those who hope to advance the state of the art within our profession.

Most of my clients confuse "designing a presentation" with "making slides look pretty." If something is well-designed, does that mean that it is attractive? Maybe, but not neessarily. Design should refer more to function than appearance. If something is well-designed, it should mean that it is properly constructed, has benefitted from forethought, and is part of an effective system. A well-designed presentation is one that delivers the right message in the right way. A pretty slide can guarantee neither.

An equally common occurrence is the client who gives me a printout of their slides and says "Here is my presentation." This grates on several levels, most notably how willing these people are to denigrate their own value statement. What does that say when presenters thinks that their slides are more important than their words? Where is the priority when the product of PowerPoint rates higher than the product of a person's thoughts?

Pretty slides = a good presentation. That is the simple equation that these two misconceptions create. It is incumbent on all of us to raise our consciousness around these points to a higher plane.

American Idol Meets Slide Design

As our annual user conference enters its seventh season, it also begins the fifth iteration of the Design-a-Template contest. From several dozen entries, we will award a trip to the event (Oct 11-14, Atlanta GA) to the person whose work is chosen as most appropriate to serve as the conference template.

Over the past four years, we have created a tradition that includes: brilliant work by exceptionally talented people; a bit of comic relief; the discovery of a unique challenge when creating a template that is to be used across many dozens of seminars; and spirited debate between our own versions of Randy, Paula, and Simon.

To see entries from year's past, including the winners, visit our Editorial Archive.

Who's Going Mobile?

With my daughter's all-consuming bat mitzvah now in our rear-view mirror, I will return, with renewed vigor, to semi-regular blog postings. Let's see if I can actually accomplish bi-weekly...

__________________

For the second edition of what we affectionately refer to now as my Sucks book, I would like to hear from PowerPoint users who are preparing content for presentations outside of the conventional notebook / projector / screen environment. Webinars
Mobile Devices
Blackberrys
iPhones
YouTube
SlideShare
FaceBook

If you have had any experience with these or other mobile environments and would like to share those experiences with our readers, I would love to hear from you.

Email me at thebook@betterppt.com

Or comment here and we can discuss. Many thanks...

The Lunacy of the Leave Behind

I am a pragmatic being. At my core, I understand the values of efficiency and expedience. I embrace the art of compromise and understand that life often gets in the way of ideals and theories. Reality is often harsh and not adjusting to it often harsher.

Yet there is one principle relevant to the presentation community on which I do not yield. One ideal to which I hold stubbornly. At this windmill, I gladly tilt: it is the notion that a presentation content creator can create one set of slides that will function ably for the projected content and for the printed material.

This is an impossible notion. Everything else in life might be possible if you work hard, but not this one thing. In my 15+ years as a presentation consultant, I have not once seen it done successfully.

Not once!

When you set forth to create content for a presentation, you work with two forces that are fundamentally at odds with one another. You want to create projected content that is compelling and you want to provide information that is complete and useful. The pragmatic being in you usually prevails, and in the interest of time, you look for a happy medium.

Unfortunately, that twain shall not meet. Nary.

As discomfiting as it may be for content creators, a properly-prepared set of visuals for a presentation will fail as leave-behind collateral. Your slides are supposed to be incomplete; they are supposed to be no more than the tease for the words that you will speak. If they say too much, they inhibit your ability to tell the story.

Read the full article at our Editorial Archive...

Can you tell your story with no text at all?

The other day I was working with a client on a presentation that had to be less than 10 minutes, and he was frustrated with the challenge of creating slide content for a talk so brief.

I said one thing to him that became a bit of a sea change.

“Why don’t you forget entirely about slides with text on them?”

[silence]

“I’ll bet you could be just as persuasive with your words, and your slides could be even more impactful.”

It needs to be said that I caught my client at a weak moment in which he was unusually receptive to such an unconventional idea. Most execs would look at me as if I were from Mars were I to suggest slides with no text on them, but the rigors of a 10-minute presentation demanded unusual measures.

His talk went beautifully. Which raises the more vital question: Could you do it? Do you know your topic well enough? And are you sufficiently in touch with the images that you would want to evoke with your audience?

If so, the search capabilities at all of the stock photo sites can help. In the case of the presentation shown here, I used the general search word “economics” to find the right imagery. I had to wade through lots of photos of currency, as well as some clichés of scales and gold bars. But it was worth the dip into the photo pool, as I uncovered photos that nicely complemented the messages of the talk.

One PowerPoint trick to note when you intend to create text-less slides: Instead of having to switch to the Blank layout for every slide, edit your slide master so that the title and the bullet placeholders are both off the slide. Just move them out of there! Now you need only issue the New Slide command to get a blank slide.

Hillary Clinton Commits Death by PowerPoint

As part of her narrative on being the more electable candidate, the campaign for Senator Hillary Clinton distributed a PowerPoint slide deck to Democratic members of the House of Representatives, to be viewed, she hoped, by many uncommitted superdelegates.

I wish she had hired me as her presentations coach -- at a minimum, I would have pushed for an entirely different approach, and if I'm being completely honest, I would have advised against sending out the slide deck at all.

As you can see from the PDF version of the deck, the slides contain consistent branding via a header but otherwise lack any sort of cohesion at all and are devoid of any effective design. Headlines all have underlines, bullets are misplaced and used inconsistently, photos are used gratuitously, and charts are overladen with information. Slides 6 - 8 contain charts that have obviously been pasted in as graphics: their top borders cut into the text. In the case of Slide 8, it is downright embarrassing.

We did not receive the actual slide deck, only low-res JPGs of the slides, so we cannot say for sure whether the Clinton team attempted to create builds to sequence some of the chunkier data, like the charts and graphs. If we give her content creators the benefit of the doubt and assume that they did create builds for the more dense slides, then they are guilty of creating no navigational assistance whatsoever for the viewers working through the slides.

The photos used are unimaginative and mostly shoved into corners of slides, with no thought whatsoever given to how they might be more evocative and more emotional. The irony here is that there are some truly excellent photos available at the Clinton website. In about one hour, I was able to produce an entire makeover of this slide deck, relying even on low-res screen grabs of website photos:

http://www.betterppt.com/blog/hillary/before_and_after.ppt

Above all, this should not have been sent as slideware; it should have been a PDF document. Without a live person advocating these positions, the bulleted content is insufficient for fleshing out the argument. Given Clinton's position as underdog, these arguments are too nuanced to be made by static bullet slides, especially poorly-designed ones. This deliverable should have been a completely-formatted document, created in InDesign or Xpress, or at a minimum, Publisher, with evocative photos, fully-formulated paragraphs, and integrated data charts.

The data and the argument are potentially compelling, but I score this as a missed opportunity for the New York Senator...

Read our more extensive writeup on our makeover at our editorial archive.