Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices… (2008)

Excellent primer on creating presentations that are thoughtful, elegant and sane. While most of the tips are geared towards traditional face to face presentations, I also found some reflections I was able to incorporate in screencast design. ( )

Visually it is a beautiful book that shows off Garr Reynolds design skills.

If you like discussing design and the art behind it, then this book is for you.

However if you want to improve your presentations this book offers very little. The useful information in the book could be condensed to about 20 pages; you are better off searching the web for articles on basic design principles.

I picked it up hoping to improve my presentations, I walk away knowing about a few more free picture sites and having seen some great examples of slides but not having learnt very much. ( )

I speed-read this today in my lunchbreak so can by no means be said to do it justice. Plus as I read, it sparked multiple ideas on how to re-think and re-imagine my presentations so that took up even more time than the reading. Great book - makes you really think about what you want to put across to people as well as the best way to accomplish that. Lovely illustrations too. ( )

In a world committed to effective training-teaching-learning, publication of Garr Reynolds'€™ beautifully produced and engagingly written book "Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery" three years ago would have resulted in the disappearance of "death by PowerPoint." The world seems to have other ideas. We still suffer through poorly designed PowerPoint presentations, where far too much text is crammed onto slides that are then read to painfully bored and tuned-out learners. Which is a shame since so much of what Reynolds suggests and displays throughout his book and on his ongoing Presentation Zen website makes so much sense and is so easy to incorporate into our work. "PowerPoint is not a method," he reminds us early in the book; "it is a tool that can be used effectively with appropriate design methods or ineffectively with inappropriate methods" (p. 12). Clarity and simplicity are the overarching themes he encourages us to explore and incorporate into our work. And if we needed proof that Reynolds cares as deeply about his audiences as we should care about ours, we find it explicitly in his admonition that "If your content is worth talking about, then bring energy and passion to your delivery. Every situation is different, but there is never an excuse for being dull" (p. 211). So let's hope his work continues to reach an ever-widening--and receptive--audience, and that dull presentations will eventually become little more than a dimly remembered nightmare. ( )

I actually teach presentation skills to undergraduates, and this book forms the basis of my philosophy when explaining how students should not make slides consisting of 6 or 7 bullet points that they then read off word for word. Anyone who has ever heard a yawn or seen drooping eyelids while they are giving a presentation should read this, and learn from it (and no, it doesn't mean using every fancy PowerPoint feature in the book - this is not a book about PowerPoint or Keynote - it's a book about presentations). ( )