Over at Duarte Design, they have put together a little video using Microsoft’s Powerpoint 2010 and I was just blown away at the things you appear to be able to do.
Check it out below:
I also think that the colour scheme and the way type is used in this video is fantastic. If you want to look professional, have pleasing slide design, then pay close attention to the colours and the way they have been used.
Here’s a slide I made up in about 5 minutes based on the colour scheme used in the video:
The RGB colour scheme I used was:
Dark brown : R88 G50 B14
Light brown : R214 G119 B11
Taking a little time out to think about your colour scheme and layout can make a real difference when you deliver a presentation. We all have some design abilities, we should use them when we deliver our presentations. Afterall, you owe it to your audience, they have given up a lot of valuable time to come and listen to you, the least you can do is show that you care.
Over at the “slides that stick” blog Jan Schultink shows all you Powerpoint users how to create an interesting slide design – well worth a read if you want your next presentation to go from good to awesome!
This final post to read is not actually from this week, but I recently read it and found it really useful. So if you are going to speak to an audience that is made up of many different nationalities, then this is a must read post from the Business Presentation blog
Have a great weekend and talk to you all again soon
It is very tempting when making your presentation to put as much information as you can on a slide in the belief that this will make your presentation look better.
Actually, what it does do is confuse your audience and they soon begin to suffer from ‘information overload’.
By putting too much information on your slide you are causing too much distraction in the slide and the audience stops listening to you, and they start to focus more on your side. When your audience stops listening to you, that is a time when you may as well not be there.
Here is an example of a slide that has been created without any thought about the audience. This was actually slide number 45 in a 68 slide presentation. I have serious doubts there was anyone left in the room by the time the presenter got to this slide as they were all very similar in design.
Genuine slide from a genuine presentation!!
Let me introduce you to the concept of “White Space”. White space is the blank space on your presentational slide. All it is is a background. Nothing else.
One of the reasons we use ‘white space’ is to help focus the audience on the point we are making. This technique is not only used in presenting. Even posters make use of ’white space’. Take a look at this poster I created for a language institute that wanted to advertise that they were opening an “entry class” business English class at 6:30am.
Apologies for the poor quality image
All the attention is drawn to the big red square in the middle of the poster. The source of my inspiration for this poster was the current Apple iPhone adverts, which use a very simple design in which a picture of the phone basically says all there needs to be said.
So next time you begin to put together your slides, think very carefully about what you put there, because when designing a presentation – “less really is more”
One of most badly delivered parts in a presentation is numbers. Quite often when someone is delivering a presentation andaregivingtheir audience a set of numbers whether it is sales figures, production costs or any kind of statistic they just create a chart or graph in Powerpoint or Keynote with just the numbers on it.
What this is to an audience is a group of numbers arranged on a chart. It has no real meaning.
In their book Made to Stick Chip and Dan Heath talk about giving those numbers meaning. here is a great example from that book.
“Bottled water costs about 8.4 cents per ounce. Municipal water in San Francisco costs about 0.0022 cents per ounce. When you read those two statistics, what you take away is this: Wow, there’s a big difference there. Bottled water costs a lot more than municipal water! But our brains aren’t very good at intuiting much more than that…”
However, they go on to give an example how the same example about municipal water and bottled water compare in price.
“The writer Charles Fishman, in a magazine article about the bottled water industry, figured out a brilliant way to make this statistic come alive. Here’s what he wrote: “In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It’s so good the EPA doesn’t require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35.” Now your brain can begin to apprehend the full scale of the difference between these numbers—it’s not a big difference, it’s a gargantuan difference! It’s a 10-and-a-half-year’s-worth-of-refilling-a- water-bottle difference.”
What you need to do is give some meaning to your numbers, rather than just stating a list of numbers.
Here is another example of great way to show statistics by the great Hans Rosling. This guy has an awesome way to present numbers and data.
The above video is available in 7 different languages at the TED.com website
There is a simple trick in English that you can use :
“We have now sold over 500,000 units of piping since we started in 2007. That means if we put all those 500,000 pipes end to end it would stretch from Seoul to Pusan and back! That’s about 500 km.”
All we have to do is present the statistic or number and then relate something that your audience can relate to. For example, if your audience has just come back from a coffee break and you are giving statistics on the amount of gasoline used in an average car per year, you could compare the number with the number of cappuccinos Starbucks sell.
So, change the way you present numbers and see your audiences eyes light up.
In the spirit of the new year, here are a number of great presentational resources you can use to help you plan, design and prepare your next presentation.
This is quite possibly the best place to go for inspiration when you have to prepare a presentation. You can choose a category to search, or you can just take a look at “presentations of the day”. Wherever you go, you will find some inspiring presentations.
From the author of Slide:ology Nancy Duarte and the team at Duarte Design produce this amazingly resourceful blog. Whenever there is a new post I am almost always the first to view it.
Quite possibly the best book ever written on presentational design and delivery. Not only do we have this book, but now we have Garr Reynolds’ latest book Presentation Zen Design.
I admit I have not read this book yet, but it is on order and I am waiting with excitement for it’s imminent arrival.
This is a must see site for anyone designing a presentation. It is quite possibly the best stock photography website out there and the prices for images are relatively cheap. It is worth making an account just so that you can get the free image every week to add to your stock photography collection.
Not always related to presentations, but Seth Godin is a genius marketeer and is full of fantastic ideas for business and making your business successful. I never go a day without reading what Seth has to say.
I hope these resources gives you the kind of inspiration that they give me.
Have a happy new year and I wish you all a successful and wonderful new year.
