I'd gotten tired of seeing the standard preso format of alternating cute/wacky Creative Commons images with stark, pithy blocks of Helvetica text, so I started

I'd gotten tired of seeing the standard preso format of alternating cute/wacky Creative Commons images with stark, pithy blocks of Helvetica text, so I started exploring different approaches to presentations. There are three "hacks" of a sort I've employed to try to make my talks more engaging, less clunky: One is to just not use any slides. Show code, run demos, talk about what I'm actually doing on the machine during the talk. I type stuff at a shell prompt or into an editor (embiggen the fonts!) if I need Text on a Screen. More often I use a simple enhanced-Textile -> HTML/CSS/JS app I wrote. Charcoal background, white text. It's sort of flakey about resizing text for screen rez, which makes it hard to reliably put a lot of text on a slide; this a bug that works for the power of good. I like that I can generate slides from notes, and quickly edit and reload. My favorite, though also most time-consuming, approach is to hand-draw all the slides. (See http://vimeo.com/13163175 http://vimeo.com/13163175 or http://vimeo.com/12993236 http://vimeo.com/12993236). Hand-drawing your slides also has an interesting technological side-effect: depending on what tools you use it becomes much harder to obsess over them and hack on them at the conference right up until you give the talk. I've been using Illustrator on my mac, but my laptops run Ubuntu and/or Win7, neither of which has Illustrator on it. I've done last-minute things in GIMP, but there's strong incentive to avoid that. Aside form the visual look, a key aspect is duration. I like short talks. 20 minutes, 40 minutes tops. It's hard to compete with twitter, IRC back-channel, and an audience that has a million things they could be doing. Better to leave people wanting more. Generate enough interest to get people curious to learn more, and kick off some hallway discussions.