Tips and Tricks

I purchased slide:ology recently to help me in presenting information to my classes. After reading through it, though, I found a number of things that help with more than just presentation design.

About the Book

Nancy Duarte is the CEO of Duarte Design, a Silicon Valley company focusing on presentation design. They are the group that helped Al Gore with his famous ‘Inconvenient Truth’ presentation. Nancy knows her stuff.

She set out to write a book that “covers how to create ideas, translate them into pictures, display them well, and then deliver them in your own natural way. It is NOT a PowerPoint manual.” Indeed, it is anything but a PowerPoint manual. Instead, she focuses on what makes a good transition vs. a bad transition; how to let the slides speak for themselves; and how to best integrate yourself into a presentation experience – instead of making your presentation into a ‘read the bulletpoints’ exercise.

There is so much about successful communication and successful graphics in this book, that it really is two things: a business communications book, and a design book. Pick it up for either of those two reasons.

Contents

Slide:ology begins with chapters entitled ‘Creating a New Slide Ideology’ and ‘Creating Ideas, Not Slides.’ These are two important chapters for getting you off the metaphorical couch and into the game. If you aren’t ready to communicate in a new, more effective way after these chapters, you should reevaluate a little. They get at the heart of what is wrong with presentations in today’s world, and set the stage for some really important chapters regarding graphics and animation.

Once you get through the beginning, planning phases, this book becomes less about business communication and more about the fundamentals of good design. Chapters regarding how to effectively display diagrams and data lead off – if you’ve ever put up a slide trying to tell someone about ‘the numbers’ going up or down, PLEASE read these chapters a couple of times. Then, there are five chapters simply about color, alignment, pictures, and movement. These chapters pertain to anyone hoping to design anything. These chapters are why I wholeheartedly recommend this book not only to presentation designers, but beginning designers of all kinds. If you’ve ever wanted to know why a particular color made you feel a particular way, Nancy addresses it.

Finally, there are two chapters that bring it back home to business communication. The first is interacting with your slides. As this blog goes on, I’ll be addressing presentation skills – but I think Nancy does a really great job of beginning the process. We don’t all have time to seek out a public speaking coach. For the rest of us, we need to pick up some skills and hints from anywhere we can. The last chapter is simply Duarte Design’s manifesto – the five theses of the Power of the Presentation. They are simple and to the point, and I think they are right on the money.

My Favorite Points

As someone who straddles the line between public speaker and design professional, I’m sucked in by nearly every word in this book. However, here are my three favorite individual pages:

Page 72: Highlighting What’s Important

I think we all fall victim to the ‘I need to get this done’ mentality from time to time. When this happens, we start thinking that we are communicating successfully… but something falls flat. People leave the presentation without a drive, a motivation. Why is that?

It’s because we don’t focus properly on what’s important. On pages 72 and 73, Nancy focuses on how to emphasize the important information in a chart. Her lessons, though, can be applied to literally anything. With the correct focus, even given only a short period of time, we can deliver the crucial information to our audience.

Page 186: Taking Lessons from the Movies

I legitimately had never considered what gave me uneasy feelings while watching animation. Pages 186 and 187 dissect what movement does to the viewer, and I think it really adds to my skillset.

Page 253: Treat Your Audience As King

This is a very simple directive, and one that I remind myself of at least twice a week. This pertains to many things in life beyond the presentation stage, and I have to hope that I’m treating you, my reading audience, as king. Please feel free to comment on our postings anytime – we’d love to hear what you think!

In Conclusion

I’m sure you can guess by my gushing here that I wholeheartedly endorse this book. To summarize, I think that it is stunningly effective at delivering a huge amount in concise form. I’ll try to strive for that goal in this blog, as well.

Slide:ology is a powerful book for designers and communicators alike. If you’d like to learn to communicate more effectively in a business environment, try out any of our Professional Development sessions; I’m particularly fond of Presentation Skills for the Professional. Also, as a designer, you may be interested in classes about Web Design or Print Design.

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