

Steal This Presentation - Adrock
http://www.slideshare.net/GlobalGossip/steal-this-presentation-5038209

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snikolov
While this is a decent set of tips for _design_ , the important thing to
remember if you are actually giving a talk is that _you_ are the presentation,
_not_ your slides.

Edit: That said, the right visual aids can be important for delivering a
powerful message. I found this pretty useful in terms of making great looking
slides that will actually help your talk by highlighting key points and
keeping people's attention.

~~~
jaysonelliot
Well put.

Don Draper doesn't need Powerpoint.

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haribilalic
That's because he has a Kodak Carousel.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus>

There's nothing wrong with using visual aids to help you deliver your message.

~~~
jaysonelliot
Funny, that's just the scene I was thinking of.

Imagine if he had preceded his visual aids with a couple dozen boards of
charts and bullet points, and shrunk the pictures down to quarter size to make
room for blocks of text explaining what he was about to say.

Visual aids are great. Projecting the text of your speech on the wall, not so
much.

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jamesbritt
I'd gotten tired of seeing the standard preso format of alternating cute/wacky
Creative Commons images with stark, pithy blocks of Helvetica text, so I
started exploring different approaches to presentations.

There are three "hacks" of a sort I've employed to try to make my talks more
engaging, less clunky:

One is to just not use any slides. Show code, run demos, talk about what I'm
actually doing on the machine during the talk. I type stuff at a shell prompt
or into an editor (embiggen the fonts!) if I need Text on a Screen.

More often I use a simple enhanced-Textile -> HTML/CSS/JS app I wrote.
Charcoal background, white text. It's sort of flakey about resizing text for
screen rez, which makes it hard to reliably put a lot of text on a slide; this
a bug that works for the power of good. I like that I can generate slides from
notes, and quickly edit and reload.

My favorite, though also most time-consuming, approach is to hand-draw all the
slides. (See <http://vimeo.com/13163175> or <http://vimeo.com/12993236>).

Hand-drawing your slides also has an interesting technological side-effect:
depending on what tools you use it becomes much harder to obsess over them and
hack on them at the conference right up until you give the talk. I've been
using Illustrator on my mac, but my laptops run Ubuntu and/or Win7, neither of
which has Illustrator on it. I've done last-minute things in GIMP, but there's
strong incentive to avoid that.

Aside form the visual look, a key aspect is duration. I like short talks. 20
minutes, 40 minutes tops. It's hard to compete with twitter, IRC back-channel,
and an audience that has a million things they could be doing. Better to leave
people wanting more. Generate enough interest to get people curious to learn
more, and kick off some hallway discussions.

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jaysonelliot
The two most important things I've learned about presentations:

1\. Look at your audience, not your slides. They didn't show up to look at the
back of your head.

2\. Put as little on the screen as possible. If you have more you want them to
read/remember afterward, make a handout with the detailed stuff. You want your
audience looking at YOU, not a slide on the wall.

Nancy Duarte was handing out copies of her book "Slideology" to speakers at
the BIL 2009 conference - it was the best schwag I've ever gotten. I can't
recommend her blog enough: <http://slideology.com/>

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FluidDjango
I was going to DL this to peruse later... then found it was a 51MB pdf.
Really: got to love that slideshare.

I thought this pretty weak compared to, for example, "Presentation Secrets of
Steve Jobs" by Carmine Gallo.

And... all the plugs for SlideShare in the presentation: what's with that?
Started to feel like more of an infomercial than anything. I'd recommend
spending 15 minutes just scanning Gallo's book at a book (I did. then bought
it anyway.)

~~~
bonzoesc
All that account ever does is upload the same presentation about doing better
presentations and using slideshare over and over again.

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nhangen
I dig this presentation in pieces, but it's a bit noisy and pretentious.

Why is it that so many people are trying to tell me how to present my
information?

I do use images as recommended, and find that they make great cues for telling
stories and fleshing out the idea, but come on...are bullet points really that
bad?

~~~
hrabago
I think the problem has been the overuse of bullet points. I'm sure there are
times when they are appropriate, such as when these slides listed what CRAP
means, but in most cases I've seen, the information would have presented
better with an alternative format.

The last few presentations I myself have given tended to follow the Lessig
style, so instead of bulleted lists, I've presented each item in its own
slide. This allowed me to bring the audience's focus on the one thing I'm
discussing at the moment, instead of wandering off into what the other items
are/could be and how they relate to or contrast with each other.

I read somewhere of the backlash against Powerpoint in the military, and the
primary reason stated was the overuse of bulleted lists.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html>

~~~
nhangen
Coming from 5 years in the Army, I can attest to what they call - "Death by
Powerpoint." It's not just the bullets, but the use of templates that suck,
formats that suck, and well...information that sucks.

Perhaps it's not the bullets that kill, but the animated ones :)

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JonathanFields
I generally focus on powerful images and one to three word phrases and use
slides largely as an "emotion force multiplier."

Even so, I don't believe any slide holds a candle to an exceptionally
structured, well-told story. People remember those a lot longer than a pretty
deck.

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mangool
Way too much text on some of these slides... that's what loses the audience.
Break down information into smaller parts and present them on short, separate
slides. This creates a fluid and engaging visual element to complement the
verbal element.

~~~
jamesbritt
"Way too much text on some of these slides... that's what loses the audience.
"

Some of that way-too-much text explains that were this a real, in-person,
presentation the text content would be severely cut back.

~~~
mangool
Good point.

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rodericksilva
and practice, practice, practice.

~~~
_delirium
Sometimes, yes, but I've found "too-practiced" talks to be a bit off-putting
as an audience member, especially if it's supposed to be more academic subject
material. Probably not an issue if you're giving a TED talk, or you're doing a
product rollout, but if I'm listening to a computer-science talk, and it's
going to err in one direction or another, I'd rather have the not-that-
rehearsed talk that fumbles a bit, versus the perfectly-scripted one that
feels more like I'm watching a performance than listening to a scientist give
me information.

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drivebyacct2
72 slides with that much text? It's tacky but, tl;dr. Oh come on. I love that
I've already been downvoted since there is no way that anyone even went
through half of those slides in the time that has elapsed since my comment.
It's _seventy-two slides_.

~~~
pyre
It seems that this presentation was made just for distribution on the internet
(i.e. no actual presenter). The presentation itself even makes reference to
the fact that it would be less wordy if it were being given to a live
audience.

