I’m paraphrasing Nancy Duarte in her new book slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations “(p. 150), which is the next salvo in the battle against terrible PowerPoint.

Right after business cards, I suspect that the poor use of PowerPoint has been a top theme on this blog since time immemorial.

And Duarte, who has been in the business for a long time, writes an excellent blog, and really busted out when her firm built the slides for Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” presentation takes much of what I learned in Presentation Zen (another must read on this topic) and digs deeper.

But, not in a way that only a designer would appreciate.

Since, as Dan Pink argues in “A Whole New Mind,” we all need to think like designers if we want to prosper in the conceptual age, developing an understanding of things like fonts (my favorite is Helvetica…the new standard for Never Stop Marketing, but mostly because I loved the documentary :-)), color palettes (I finally understand what the color wheel is supposed to do), complementary colors, and layout via a grid system.

Fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to give a lot of presentations recently and I look forward to doing more.

With Nancy’s help, I’m definitely going to integrate these lessons into future decks to increase the effectiveness of the presentation.

If you give presentations, I think it’s worth your time to take a look at what she wrote.

After all, if your presentation isn’t remarkable, why bother?

Of course, that’s only half the battle.

The other half is having the guts to say, “to hell with bullet points.”

(And yes, this website is getting a design overhaul, as it is not up to Nancy’s standards. All in good time.)

 

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