How to present in English

Over the last few days, there has been much comment of the slide that was featured in the New York Times newspaper regarding the slide that Gen. Stanley A McChrystal, leader of the American and NATO forces in Afghanistan was shown when took over the leadership in Afghanistan.

Gen. McChrystal was heard to comment “when we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war”.

There are far too many problems with this slide to go in to here, but here is my take on the whole debate:

PowerPoint and Keynote are tools that can be used to enhance our presentations, and can both be useful in conveying our message in a stronger and more friendly manner than by words alone. However, over the years our presentation software has become the main focus of our presentation, and that is where we are going wrong. PowerPoint and Keynote were never developed to be the main focus of the presentation. They were developed to help the presenter.

The above slide is creating news now, but I have sat through hundreds of presentation with slides similar to this one. Presentations where the text was too small and there was far too much detail in the slides. This never enhances our message, this always confuses our message and our audience will just turn off.

During the Battle of Britain in World War II, there was no PowerPoint or Keynote software, and so the British airforce used a table, with models for aircraft and a map to follow the war. This not only simplified a very complex battle, it also enabled the leaders of the war to fully understand what was happening in a clear and accurate way.

While today we may not have access to tables with maps and models, we do have access to white boards and flip charts. When we are faced with describing a very complex situation, the use of flip charts and white boards can make the explanation much easier for our audience. We must always remember, that when it comes to presenting, PowerPoint and Keynote are just one kind of tool from many different kinds. The key to a good presentation is simplicity, not detail.

There is a lot of comment on this article. For more insights and opinions please see:

Nancy Duarte of the Slide:ology blog

Guy Kawasaki on the Holy Kaw blog

Last Friday afternoon I went out to take some pictures of the wonderful cherry blossom in my local park (Olympic Park, SE Seoul). While I was taking these pictures, I had in my mind how I could use these images as slides in future presentations. This thinking changed the way I took the photographs as I had to think about leaving space in the images for text.

And that is a very important point. If you do presentations regularly, collecting a file of photos can really help you to create some amazing slides, that have a real feel to them. As you can see from the above slide, the cherry blossom is placed on the right side of the image leaving plenty of space on the left for text. This image is now placed in my “Stock Photos” file on my computer, so in future, I have a great image, with no worries about copyright or usage.

In a previous post I mentioned about creating a “Stock Photo” folder, and the creation of this folder can really help you when your creative juices are not flowing particularly fast. These images can give you inspiration, as well as some amazing images for your files.

As a postscript to this. Professional photographer Thomas Hawke, has an amazing photo stream over at Flickr.com. Thomas is an unusual photographer as most of the images he has made available on his Flickr stream are on the “Creative Commons” licence, so you are free to use these images for your presentations (subject to certain limitations)

Planning ahead by creating a stock photo album on your computer can not only save you some time, it can also give you some amazing inspiration. So start creating today.

대부분의 프레젠테이션을 살펴보면, 슬라이드 텍스트를 수평으로 정형하는것이 발표자들 사이에서 일종의 불문율처럼 보여집니다. 저도 언제 어디서부터 이런 규칙이 생겼는지는 잘 모르지만, 만약 여러분이 텍스트 디자인을 항상 수평으로만 생각하신다면, 무언가 재미있고 흥미로운 슬라이드를 디자인하기가 어렵다고 느끼시게 될 겁니다.

모든 슬라이드 텍스트를 반드시 수평으로 정렬해야 한다는 규칙은 세상 어디에도 없습니다. 여러분 모두, 세상에 있지도 않은 그런 규칙에서 벗어나, 텍스트를 기울여도 보고 비스듬하게도 만들어 보면서 슬라이드 디자인을 즐겨보시기 바랍니다.

슬라이드에 이미지를 삽입하실 때, 텍스트를 비스듬하게 놓으시면 여러분의 슬라이드를 더욱 더 생동감 넘치게 만들 수 있습니다. 하지만 기울인 텍스트와 이미지가 서로 조화를 이루는지 확인 해 보셔야 합니다. 이미지와 함께 텍스트를 이곳 저곳 놓아보시면서 슬라이드에 가장 잘 어울리는 부분을 찾아보시기 바랍니다.

위의 그림 중간에 보이는 수평선을 응용해, 그 수평선을 따라 메인 텍스트를 자연스럽게 기울여 이미지와 퍼펙트하게 어울리는 슬라이드를 만들어 보았습니다.

슬라이드의 주인은 바로 여러분 자신입니다. 슬라이드 안의 텍스트는 여러분이 원하시는 곳 어디에든 넣을 수 있다는 것을 항상 기억하시기 바랍니다. 한가지 여러분이 따라 주셔야 할 점은, 여러분 자신의 시각으로 텍스트와 이미지 사이의 조화를 찾아보시고, 이 둘이 서로 발란스를 이루도록 해야 한다는 것입니다.

그러므로 기억하세요! 텍스트를 꼭 수평으로 유지해야할 필요가 없습니다. 텍스트를 기울일 수도 있고, 수직으로 만들수도 있는 것입니다. 가장 중요한 것은 텍스트와 이미지의 발란스를 유지하고, 텍스트를 이곳 저곳 놓아보면서 디자인을 마음껏 즐기는 것입니다.

I love the typeface “Helvetica” I love its simplicity, its clarity and the way it always looks modern. Anyone who has been a member of any of my audiences will know that most of my presentations are filled with slides using Helvetica.

One of the problems you may experience when you present in English is that you are probably not aware of of the many different fonts out there. I wrote recently on the different fonts I use and why and in what circumstances I use them, but when it comes to a straight forward presentation, where the goal is to present information in a simple, memorable way, then Helvetica wins all the time.

Helvetica, in my opinion, looks best black on white (as in the image above), but it also looks great white on black.

Helvetica is such an iconic font, that they even made a movie about it. Here’s the trailer for the movie

Here are some tips when using Helvetica:

• Keep words to a minimum (Helvetica looks great with only a few words)

• Combine big letters with small ones (see above illustration)

• Use simple colours with simple backgrounds

• Spread letters out in your big sized words

• Use the whole Helvetica family

So next time you are thinking about your presentation. I say … go with Helvetica

There is a right way and a wrong way to present using images. The first thing to know is randomly taking images from the internet is not only unprofessional, but in most cases illegal. Most images that you find on the internet are copyright protected and if your presentation is recorded or published online anywhere you could find yourself owing the owner of those images a lot of money. Best advise; don’t do it.

Secondly, most images from he internet are of poor quality and really do not help to make your presentation look professional.

There are many places where you can obtain good quality images, legally, that are free. The best place is Flickr. Flickr has a category called “creative commons” and what this essentially means is that the images are made available by the owner for you to use for non-profit purposes. Non-profit purposes means they cannot be used in product materials where the intention is to sell something, or in a book or magazine article where your direct purpose is to make a profit. However, if you want to use the images in your presentation, then generally this will be OK as long as you make sure that you credit the owner for the image in your presentation.

How To Use Images

Once you have selected your images, just randomly placing the images in your slide is unlikely to have the impact you desire. As will all things design there is a right way and a wrong way to make your point. Let’s look at an example:

In this example, the image has a white background, but the slide has a graduated black to grey background. This is a common error many presenters make. To give this image more impact you could change the background to white and resize the image to fit the slide.

There is also another problem with this image. The main speaker is facing away from the words so your eyes are drawn away from the words. Try to make sure that the main person in the image is facing the words to give them greater impact.

Now the image takes centre stage and the impact of the slide is greater. “a picture paints a thousand words” and it our job as presenters to make those pictures paint those words.

A word of warning here…. If you have a low quality image, then resizing to fit your slide could distort the image and this looks very bad. So when it comes to using images, search for good quality images that will allow for some resizing.

In his blog, Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds shows some excellent sample slides on other ways you can or cannot use images. Click here to view

Personally, I like images where there is a lot of white space for text. Here is a sample slide where there is plenty of space for text.

In this slide you can see there is a lot of free space on the right side of the image to place some text or words. The slide is not busy, or cluttered and it makes for a nice, clean, calm image.

So, next time you set about creating your presentation, remember, the images you use will make a huge difference to the professionalism of your presentation.