I once attended a presentation by designer Bruce Mau. It was after lunch, a tough time to keep people’s attention. Mau structured his talk around a list of points from his personal design manifesto. Each point was as short, sweet, and crisp as an intellectual fortune cookie. “Number 14. Don’t be cool.” “Number 20. Be careful to take risks.” “Number 25. Don’t clean your desk.” Instead of rolling out his points in numerical order, he released them in a seemingly random sequence (8, 2, 5, 30 …). The audience was transfixed.
In contrast to Mau’s clever take on conventions are those deadly scenarios where presenters drone on through screen after screen of dreary text, reading aloud word for word. Multimedia often serves more as a crutch for the speaker than as an illuminating communication with an audience. PowerPoint has gotten a bad rap on account of the ugly and inane stuff people do with it: huge logos and toxic gradients; cheesy transitions and stale clip art; and text—lots and lots of it, arranged in endless lists of bullet points. Shoot me now.
Yet PowerPoint and its more elegant sister Keynote (for the Mac) are not inherently evil—they simply have been abused and over-used to the point of exhaustion. Mastery of this basic software is a required skill in many lines of work. PowerPoint files can be printed, posted, and emailed as well as projected on a screen. They enable collaboration and multimedia authoring. What’s more, PowerPoint is so easy to learn, even your boss could do it.
Long the butt of cruel humor, PowerPoint is undergoing a bit of a renaissance. Pecha Kucha (pronounced pet-shah coot-shah) is a presentation format that’s sweeping the world. Each speaker in a Pecha Kucha event shows twenty slides, which are timed to display automatically for twenty seconds each, yielding about six and a half minutes on stage. Devised by a pair of Tokyo-based architects, Pecha Kucha keeps every speaker at an event moving along quickly and fluidly.
Following are some suggestions for how to create audience-friendly presentations—and what to avoid. EL
The Meatballer: Marketing Campaign The Meatballer: Marketing Campaign
In a marketplace saturated with kitchen gadgets, millions of households still do not own a meatballer.
Many home cooks dislike touching meat. The meatballer eliminates the “yuck factor” from meatball-making.
Perfect, uniformly shaped meatballs prevent domestic conflict by making everyone’s meatball the same size. No more battles over who gets the biggest meatball!
With meatballs so easy to make, households will find many new uses for these charming orbs of meat, from arts and crafts projects to wholesome family games.don’t.
• Don’t overload your slides with mountains of text. The only thing duller than listening to someone read a speech is to follow along on screen while they are reading it.
• Don’t put long lists of bullet points on a single screen. Present no more than three points on a single slide, and keep them short.
• Don’t use cute or curly typefaces. The font used above (Comic Sans) tries to look casual and handmade—and yet PowerPoint presentations are carefully planned and scripted. Save spontaneity for your oral delivery. Keep your electronic presentation calm and authoritative.
• Don’t use complex, distracting backgrounds. If your presentation is dull, a rainbow-colored gradient won’t make it more interesting. For showing your presentation on screen, a black background with white text is considered ideal—the background disappears, allowing the text to float. But if your users will be printing out your slides, use a white background instead, for a “greener,” toner-saving print job.
• Don’t produce an important document in PowerPoint when another format would be more effective. For example, your company’s emergency evacuation plan may be better delivered on a one-page PDF than in a fifty-slide PowerPoint show.
Pose questions.
Use simple, informative graphics.
Combine image and text.
Let them know when it’s almost over.
do
• Do anchor your thoughts with short chunks of text, underscoring your subject matter for the audience. Use text to inspire and provoke people, not to impress them or lull them to sleep.
• Do ask questions. Posing a concise and provocative query on screen can build interest and suspense.
• Do choose a clear, readable font and deploy it in consistent sizes, large enough to read from a distance. If colleagues are going to download or edit your presentation, you will need to use a typeface that they have access to, such as Helvetica, Times Roman, Verdana, or Georgia.
• Do use images to illuminate and demonstrate your ideas. Add some “show” to your “tell.”
• Do consider alternative tools. Use page layout software such as InDesign to create beautiful, precise slides; export a PDF for your presentation. Other presentation media include slide shows set up in Flickr, blogs or websites that the audience can respond to later, and DVDs designed with a nicely crafted menu. Or, skip electronic media altogether and give your audience a paper handout; they can write on it and take it home.