Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations
by Garr Reynolds
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Creating and delivering a successful presentation today often means breaking through the noise and allowing your audience to focus on you and your message. You can have a great impact using simple design choices in your presentations but you just need to know where to start. Here to guide you on your journey is best-selling author and popular speaker Garr Reynolds, whose design wisdom and advice will open your eyes and give you new ways to look at your slides. Filled with practical insights show more and plenty of examples, you’ll learn how to design effective presentations that contain text, data, color, images, and video. Once the design guidelines are established, you will benefit from Garr’s years of experience as a master presenter and learn how you can achieve an overall harmony and balance using the powerful tenet of simplicity. Not only will you discover how to design your slides for more professional-looking presentations, you’ll learn to communicate more clearly and will accomplish the goal of making a stronger, more lasting connection with your audience. show lessTags
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This follow-up to Garr Reynolds' first booklet isn't bad in itself. There is much valuable stuff in there. It just happens that most of it was already present in his first booklet. It is a nice and helpful present to Powerpoint challenged people and is an improvement over the previous booklet.
For owners of his previous book, though, this is a disappointment. More and more of the factors Reynolds treats are problems no longer. Anyone using Apple software will have to put in a lot of effort to even produce terrible slides. Even Powerpoint (out of the box) is getting better to help people create good presentations. Thus, Reynolds' advice on the right use of pictures feels dated and only scratches the surface.
Let me illustrate this with one show more of the slides he includes: On page 102, he "improves" the bullet-point slide "How will Japanese Airlines (JAL) reduce the workforce by 5000 (people)?" by expanding a small airplane picture to full size and slants the writing a bit to the left. This is just rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic. A true reworking of the presentation would rip out the undefined corporate speak ("normal attrition", etc.) and replace them with meaningful, concrete measures the company is going to undertake.
Similarly, he includes a colleague's advice to shoot and create your own images for a presentation, which is fine for a major project - but out of the question for everyone's weekly presentation. Presentation advice book authors need to shift their focus from helping people make their slides prettier to making their content understandable (more Minto, more Tufte!). It is not difficult to create emotional appeal to fight pollution, world hunger or save animals (as do most TED presentations). Adding a nicely designed frog is just the 2010 version of the Powerpoint bean figures. A good advice book should help with boring presentation matter (sales reports, etc.). This is a step backwards. show less
For owners of his previous book, though, this is a disappointment. More and more of the factors Reynolds treats are problems no longer. Anyone using Apple software will have to put in a lot of effort to even produce terrible slides. Even Powerpoint (out of the box) is getting better to help people create good presentations. Thus, Reynolds' advice on the right use of pictures feels dated and only scratches the surface.
Let me illustrate this with one show more of the slides he includes: On page 102, he "improves" the bullet-point slide "How will Japanese Airlines (JAL) reduce the workforce by 5000 (people)?" by expanding a small airplane picture to full size and slants the writing a bit to the left. This is just rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic. A true reworking of the presentation would rip out the undefined corporate speak ("normal attrition", etc.) and replace them with meaningful, concrete measures the company is going to undertake.
Similarly, he includes a colleague's advice to shoot and create your own images for a presentation, which is fine for a major project - but out of the question for everyone's weekly presentation. Presentation advice book authors need to shift their focus from helping people make their slides prettier to making their content understandable (more Minto, more Tufte!). It is not difficult to create emotional appeal to fight pollution, world hunger or save animals (as do most TED presentations). Adding a nicely designed frog is just the 2010 version of the Powerpoint bean figures. A good advice book should help with boring presentation matter (sales reports, etc.). This is a step backwards. show less
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Garr Reynolds is the Author of the author of the best-selling books Presentation Zen and Presentation Zen Design, and a leading authority on presentation design and delivery. A sought-after speaker and consultant, his clients include many in the Fortune 500; A Writer, designer, musician, and long-time student of the Zen arts, he is currently show more Associate Professor Management at Kansai Gaidai University in Japan and Director of Design Matters Japan Garr's popular blog on presentation design and delivery is at www.presentationzen.com. show less
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