> Printing 30 mostly irrelevant slides for a handful of people for a meeting is not good use of paper.
If they are irrelevant, yes.
But then again, printouts have their place in presentations as well. I recall Edward Tufte advocating for using handouts - i.e. if your talk features things like graphs, diagrams and data, it's a good idea to collect them into a document that you would then print and distribute throughout the audience. People can then look at the graphs in high resolution and also take notes.
Inspired by this, the last time I did a lecture on fixed timestamps in videogames I took all graphs, diagrams and source code fragments, put them on a single A4 page and printed a copy for each of 60+ people present. From what I could tell afterwards, this was really useful - people could consult examples in their own pace and there were zero complaints about source being unreadable for people in back seats. So the next time I'll be doing a lecture, I'll likely design and print handouts too.
Of course all of this applies to educational presentations, not to marketing ones. There's no point to waste paper on the latter, they're all about invoking emotions anyway.
> the last time I did a lecture on fixed timestamps in videogames I took all graphs, diagrams and source code fragments, put them on a single A4 page and printed a copy for each of 60+ people present
Not that you were looking for my approval, but this is 100% good use of paper in my books. Extra points for putting them nicely together in compact form, that all the relevant information can be seen with a single glimpse :)
If they are irrelevant, yes.
But then again, printouts have their place in presentations as well. I recall Edward Tufte advocating for using handouts - i.e. if your talk features things like graphs, diagrams and data, it's a good idea to collect them into a document that you would then print and distribute throughout the audience. People can then look at the graphs in high resolution and also take notes.
Inspired by this, the last time I did a lecture on fixed timestamps in videogames I took all graphs, diagrams and source code fragments, put them on a single A4 page and printed a copy for each of 60+ people present. From what I could tell afterwards, this was really useful - people could consult examples in their own pace and there were zero complaints about source being unreadable for people in back seats. So the next time I'll be doing a lecture, I'll likely design and print handouts too.
Of course all of this applies to educational presentations, not to marketing ones. There's no point to waste paper on the latter, they're all about invoking emotions anyway.