O’Reilly sponsored a webinar today with Nancy Duarte as a cross promotion of her book, Slide:ology. She is perhaps, before the book, best known as the person who did Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ deck which won him an Oscar, so she has a bit of credibility on the subject of creating a nice presentation. As someone who is starting to speak more, I am getting more-and-more aware of my lack of presentation-fu. (And that of the testing community at large.)

  • The mission of her company is to ‘make the complex simple’. Nice.
  • It is the job of leaders to eliminate uncertainty
  • The bar for presentations is (currently) so low in most places.
  • There is a scale at play here. Document -> Telepromptor -> Presentation. Obviously you want to be on the right hand.
  • The Presentation Landscape is a great reference for what type of presentation you should be creating for which audience and for what purpose
  • The default template in PowerPoint makes ‘documents’ not ‘presentations’
  • Rule of thumb – If a slide takes longer than 3 seconds to absorb, it has too much stuff on it. (She then did a fun trick of showing a couple slides for 3 seconds to illustrate the effect. Awesome.)
  • Only one message per slide
  • Make the illustration match the messages. For example, is a line drawing Marilyn Monroe right for a quote about simplicity?
  • Think like a designer
  • Design creates higher perceived value
  • The first, most obvious idea is not the best idea
  • Slides are free. Have lots.
  • Have only what you are talking about now on the page
  • What is the best way to display the information you need to convey the meaning you want?
  • Rule of thumb – Make you presentation look like it could be a magazine spread
  • STAR – Something They will Always Remember
  • As a presenter, you have the opportunity to deliver a profound experience
  • She is doing a series of for-cost webinars which expound on these topics, and more

One other cool thing about the webinar is all attendees get 45 days access to the book in Safari. Of course, if O’Reilly wanted to send me a dead-tree copy, they have my mailing address…