5 ms·

Designing Presentations

130 points by idan 14y ago

davidkatz 14y ago
Excellent post. One thing which the OP alluded to but I think deserves strengthening - 80% of the quality of your talk is in your talk, not in your slides. The OP helps focus you on your talk by giving you rules of thumb like 'less content'. That's good advice. Along the same lines, if you're just getting started, it's not a good idea to attempt to make your slides beautiful. Plain old text on solid backgrounds will do just fine. To drive this point home, go watch some TED talks. The slides on those things can get positively ugly, but that hardly detracts from the quality of the talk. That hinges almost solely on the speaker.
timonv 14y ago
Great post! I noticed that presentations which give actionable, discussable points can give a but load of positive feedback and fun talks in the after track. For instance, not just showing that x is cooler than y, but actually showing how to use x more effectively than y. The difference is small, but I think it's pretty major in its effect.
zoop 14y ago
I agree with a lot in this post. It doesn't happen all the time, but if I can I prefer to present without slides at all.
vi4m 14y ago
Maybe it's just me, but I don't like theese cool presentations filled with expressive words 'DO IT!', 'NEVER DON'T DO THAT' "bitches" "programming motherfuckers". It's funny, but not for 100th time. Another example are pictures, or memes pasted into the presentation. Maybe sometimes it is funny, when there is one funny picture, or the subject of presentation is chalenging. But very often amount of 'coolness' is too much to me to handle. I often find presenters not knowing subject enough for answering questions(they just make jokes, etc). Maybe should we just go back to excellent but simple, polite, content(text) rich presentations ?
- takluyver 14y ago
  I agree, the 'one word slides' can be overused. But I don't think text-rich slides are the answer - the audience always ends up focussing on the slides, while the speaker says the same thing. It's like watching TV with subtitles: you can't keep your eyes off the text, and it subtly subtracts from the experience. I also dislike presentations that have been written in Latex/Markdown and then converted to slides. Slides aren't just a different format to render a document into, they're there to support what a person's saying.
  - dagw 14y ago
    like watching TV with subtitles Subtitles are great when the volume is way too low, it's in a language you aren't proficient in or the person is talking in a language he isn't proficient in. For the sort of slides being suggested here to work requires a lot from the topic being presented, the presenter and the audience. Only follow this advice if you're confident that all three components will line up for you.
- saraid216 14y ago
  It works when the speaker has built a rapport with you. It doesn't work when it's an orphaned slide on a web page.
- RivieraKid 14y ago
  I agree, I rarely find the "WAT" / cats / etc. funny or cool. I love humour but this has the same level of funniness as someone falling down the stairs in a bad comedy movie. "Bitches" is not only unfunny, I find it irritating for some reason.
Robdr 14y ago
Awesome post! I absolutely agree to the fact that the quality of the presentation is in the talk and not in the slides. However, I still would like to make these beautiful looking slides. Does anyone have pointers on how make your slides look beautiful without being a trained designer?
- apl 14y ago
  > Does anyone have pointers on how make your slides look > beautiful without being a trained designer? By keeping it simple. Pick one good font. As little text as possible. No templates[1]. Solid image material (sufficient resolution, used sparingly, do not overcrowd the slide with superfluous visuals). Without much work, you've outdone 90% of your competition. [1] By that I mean: No fancy pre-made visual templates. For the sake of consistency, using the templating mechanism of your chosen tool (Keynote, PowerPoint, Beamer[2]) is highly recommended. But you'll have to create your own templates. [2] Don't use Beamer.
  - taeric 14y ago
    What is the problem with beamer?
    - elisehein 14y ago
      I think Beamer is great for things like lecture slides and other presentation where the aim is to pass on dense amounts of information. When using slides to illustrate rather than summarise, however, it requires a series of hacks to position, resize, add custom colours and images or fonts. It also gives you standard elements that you probably don't want in these illustrative slides, such as the slide number, author and subtitle on the footer of each slide.
      - taeric 14y ago
        Hmm.... I'm not sure I understand this thread, then. Do you view the predominant advice of this article as really only relevant for somewhat "informal" talks? Because, pretty much every presentation I've ever had to give was fairly dense in information. (Also, I think if you are just doing an image for the whole slide, that isn't too tough in beamer. Just switch to the default theme and don't provide a title for the slide. Right?)
drue 14y ago
I agree with the premise that the author is challenging. However.. "Better to have something clean, typographical, and timeless than a powerpoint cliché." -- the article Two cute slides per minute of no actual content can also be just as cliché and irritating as wall-of-text slides.
- ScottWhigham 14y ago
  I don't understand why people are downvoting this. Maybe they are downvoting because they disagree? I don't really see that as a reason to downvote but maybe that's it.
- idan 14y ago
  If all of your content is in the slides and the slides are contentless, then the presenter has deeper problems. The point here is that slides are for illustration. It is fine to have brief slides if they dont get in the way of the _presenting_.
japhyr 14y ago
I attended both of Idan's talks at PyCon last year, and they were informative and inspiring. [1-3] As someone new to attending technical conferences, I appreciate the recent focus on sharing good presentation techniques. It is easy to think that all of these inspiring speakers are just good at public speaking. But it turns out that most of these people just work really hard at getting everything right. Posts like this inspire me to figure out exactly what my strengths are, and begin building meaningful presentations around those strengths. [1] Data, Design and Meaning: http://pyvideo.org/video/637/data-design-meaning http://pyvideo.org/video/637/data-design-meaning [2] Sketching a Better Product: http://pyvideo.org/video/957/sketching-a-better-product http://pyvideo.org/video/957/sketching-a-better-product [3] All PyCon 2012 talks: http://pyvideo.org/category/17/pycon-us-2012 http://pyvideo.org/category/17/pycon-us-2012
- assaflavie 14y ago
  +1 Idan is a terrific speaker. That, together with gorgeous slides, is just unfair to the rest of us.
CJefferson 14y ago
As someone who sees a lot of students start to get into presenting, there is one important thing (in my opinion) to remember. You should certainly aim to present beautiful presentations, with informative and colourful slides, with minimal bullet points and no text dumps. However, make sure you design a presentation you can give. Everything you take off your slides is more information you have to give your audience. When starting out, there is nothing wrong with using slides as a crutch. Some of the worst talks I have ever seen consisted of minimalist slides and a speaker who was just not (yet) capable of presenting completely solo. At least with info-dump slides, I can still follow the presentation by reading the slides!
- elisehein 14y ago
  In a way though, this could serve as a kind of test for the student beforehand to see which parts they're comfortable with. I recently gave a presentation like this as part of my course and tried to follow the style described in the article. I started out with quite a nice visually appealing set of minimalistic slides, but ended up with a hybrid of that and what you usually see in lectures that also need to serve as handouts for later. So yes, I agree that people giving presentations as part of school projects should be cautious about trying to do more than they are ready for, but I also think it's somewhat a shame that we aren't given enough opportunities to practice that other side of presenting as well.
  - CJefferson 14y ago
    I have been trying to increase the amount of practice students get. Irritatingly, many students get very annoyed when asked to give talks for which they will not be graded, which makes it hard to give students the chance to practice in a risk-free (by which I mean mark-free) environment.
- saraid216 14y ago
  I kind of disagree. I think that, once you start using a crutch, you're almost certainly never going to stop, especially in a perceived-risk-high situation like public speaking. "Info-dump slides worked last time. I'll go with what works again, rather than adding risk by trying to be more minimal," repeat ad infinitum. It's better to recognize that you just didn't prepare enough (didn't practice sufficiently; didn't know your subject well enough; didn't anticipate questions and concerns; etc.) and prepare better next time. It might be a little different in a teacher-student environment where direct guidance is possible and disasters can be coddled and mitigated and explained away as "this is a learning environment; screwing up is okay". Just... don't grade it.
2468ben 14y ago
I made a tutorial in grad school for people who give (mostly technical) presentations: http://www.rustyandfriends.com/powertothepoint http://www.rustyandfriends.com/powertothepoint
mhb 14y ago
inception some ideas into their heads Good god!
- idan 14y ago
  Not sure if disgusted with creative grammar / neologisms.
  - mhb 14y ago
    I'll confirmation that.
iamctodd 14y ago
Hi, I teach a presentation design class at a business school and have developed a tool called the Lean Presenter's Canvas. It is v0.1 (literally released this week) and is based off years of teaching this MBA class as well as working with business professionals on their presentations. It is intended to be a guide to map out a presentation in one page before spending too much time in slideware. Take a look: http://ow.ly/fKxGB http://ow.ly/fKxGB [.pdf] You can learn more and stay up-to-date at: http://leanpresenter.com http://leanpresenter.com We'll post revisions based on usage and feedback as well as offering more tools to help craft and design a presentation (all licensed under Creative Commons). Since we're following a lean approach - feedback is welcome! Cheers, C Todd @iamctodd
- iamctodd 14y ago
  To clarify - this is a tool meant for understanding your audience and structuring your story before designing any supporting visuals. I have found that when you have the story ironed out, any supporting visuals are much easier to create.
saraid216 14y ago
Something I tend to emphasize is the question of confidence. People always complain about not being confident enough to do a good presentation. I've responded to this by explaining that confidence is built: you know your subject matter, you know where you got your results from, you know your audience, and so on. Experience and chutzpah let you fill in holes, but all of your actual confidence comes from knowing how the communication is going to work.
guiambros 14y ago
While I agree with most of OP's comments for live events, keep in mind frequently presentations are shared, and not really presented. Within typical business scenarios, presentations are forwarded to other people that were not present, so you don't have the benefit of the speaker explaining what that beautiful minimalistic photo of a turtle-in-the-middle-of-the-desert really meant. Even presentations from live events will be on slideshare, frequently without the voice/video track. The examples included on OP's post ratify my point; nice visually, but almost useless when shared without the voice-over. There's no debate that ugly or confusing slides can and should be avoided. But bullet points don't ruin a presentation, you can tell a story one word at a time, and sometimes even info-dump slides have a role to play. See Mary Meeker's crowded presentations. See Steve Jobs's smart use of bullet points. See Lessig's one-word-per-slide style. Bottom line: presentation style is like programming languages: you have to find the best one for the job, and do it beautifully. Understand the audience and the appropriate style, rather than rely on canned rules like "bullets are evil". Code as a craft.
edandersen 14y ago
Garr Reynolds has an excellent blog about giving great, bullet point free Presentations: http://www.presentationzen.com/ http://www.presentationzen.com/ His book, Presentation Zen, comes highly recommended (not a referral link): http://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Zen-Simple-Delivery-Edition/dp/0321811984/ http://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Zen-Simple-Delivery-Editi...
- samsolomon 14y ago
  Second. I own this book, and it is a must for anyone giving presentations.

130 points by idan 14y ago

Excellent post. One thing which the OP alluded to but I think deserves strengthening - 80% of the quality of your talk is in your talk, not in your slides. The OP helps focus you on your talk by giving you rules of thumb like 'less content'. That's good advice. Along the same lines, if you're just getting started, it's not a good idea to attempt to make your slides beautiful. Plain old text on solid backgrounds will do just fine. To drive this point home, go watch some TED talks. The slides on those things can get positively ugly, but that hardly detracts from the quality of the talk. That hinges almost solely on the speaker.

timonv 14y ago

Great post! I noticed that presentations which give actionable, discussable points can give a but load of positive feedback and fun talks in the after track. For instance, not just showing that x is cooler than y, but actually showing how to use x more effectively than y. The difference is small, but I think it's pretty major in its effect.

zoop 14y ago

I agree with a lot in this post. It doesn't happen all the time, but if I can I prefer to present without slides at all.

vi4m 14y ago

Maybe it's just me, but I don't like theese cool presentations filled with expressive words 'DO IT!', 'NEVER DON'T DO THAT' "bitches" "programming motherfuckers". It's funny, but not for 100th time. Another example are pictures, or memes pasted into the presentation. Maybe sometimes it is funny, when there is one funny picture, or the subject of presentation is chalenging. But very often amount of 'coolness' is too much to me to handle. I often find presenters not knowing subject enough for answering questions(they just make jokes, etc). Maybe should we just go back to excellent but simple, polite, content(text) rich presentations ?

takluyver 14y ago
I agree, the 'one word slides' can be overused. But I don't think text-rich slides are the answer - the audience always ends up focussing on the slides, while the speaker says the same thing. It's like watching TV with subtitles: you can't keep your eyes off the text, and it subtly subtracts from the experience. I also dislike presentations that have been written in Latex/Markdown and then converted to slides. Slides aren't just a different format to render a document into, they're there to support what a person's saying.
- dagw 14y ago
  like watching TV with subtitles Subtitles are great when the volume is way too low, it's in a language you aren't proficient in or the person is talking in a language he isn't proficient in. For the sort of slides being suggested here to work requires a lot from the topic being presented, the presenter and the audience. Only follow this advice if you're confident that all three components will line up for you.
saraid216 14y ago
It works when the speaker has built a rapport with you. It doesn't work when it's an orphaned slide on a web page.
RivieraKid 14y ago
I agree, I rarely find the "WAT" / cats / etc. funny or cool. I love humour but this has the same level of funniness as someone falling down the stairs in a bad comedy movie. "Bitches" is not only unfunny, I find it irritating for some reason.

Robdr 14y ago

Awesome post! I absolutely agree to the fact that the quality of the presentation is in the talk and not in the slides. However, I still would like to make these beautiful looking slides. Does anyone have pointers on how make your slides look beautiful without being a trained designer?

apl 14y ago
> Does anyone have pointers on how make your slides look > beautiful without being a trained designer? By keeping it simple. Pick one good font. As little text as possible. No templates[1]. Solid image material (sufficient resolution, used sparingly, do not overcrowd the slide with superfluous visuals). Without much work, you've outdone 90% of your competition. [1] By that I mean: No fancy pre-made visual templates. For the sake of consistency, using the templating mechanism of your chosen tool (Keynote, PowerPoint, Beamer[2]) is highly recommended. But you'll have to create your own templates. [2] Don't use Beamer.
- taeric 14y ago
  What is the problem with beamer?
  - elisehein 14y ago
    I think Beamer is great for things like lecture slides and other presentation where the aim is to pass on dense amounts of information. When using slides to illustrate rather than summarise, however, it requires a series of hacks to position, resize, add custom colours and images or fonts. It also gives you standard elements that you probably don't want in these illustrative slides, such as the slide number, author and subtitle on the footer of each slide.
    - taeric 14y ago
      Hmm.... I'm not sure I understand this thread, then. Do you view the predominant advice of this article as really only relevant for somewhat "informal" talks? Because, pretty much every presentation I've ever had to give was fairly dense in information. (Also, I think if you are just doing an image for the whole slide, that isn't too tough in beamer. Just switch to the default theme and don't provide a title for the slide. Right?)

drue 14y ago

I agree with the premise that the author is challenging. However.. "Better to have something clean, typographical, and timeless than a powerpoint cliché." -- the article Two cute slides per minute of no actual content can also be just as cliché and irritating as wall-of-text slides.

ScottWhigham 14y ago
I don't understand why people are downvoting this. Maybe they are downvoting because they disagree? I don't really see that as a reason to downvote but maybe that's it.
idan 14y ago
If all of your content is in the slides and the slides are contentless, then the presenter has deeper problems. The point here is that slides are for illustration. It is fine to have brief slides if they dont get in the way of the _presenting_.

japhyr 14y ago

I attended both of Idan's talks at PyCon last year, and they were informative and inspiring. [1-3] As someone new to attending technical conferences, I appreciate the recent focus on sharing good presentation techniques. It is easy to think that all of these inspiring speakers are just good at public speaking. But it turns out that most of these people just work really hard at getting everything right. Posts like this inspire me to figure out exactly what my strengths are, and begin building meaningful presentations around those strengths. [1] Data, Design and Meaning: http://pyvideo.org/video/637/data-design-meaning http://pyvideo.org/video/637/data-design-meaning [2] Sketching a Better Product: http://pyvideo.org/video/957/sketching-a-better-product http://pyvideo.org/video/957/sketching-a-better-product [3] All PyCon 2012 talks: http://pyvideo.org/category/17/pycon-us-2012 http://pyvideo.org/category/17/pycon-us-2012

assaflavie 14y ago
+1 Idan is a terrific speaker. That, together with gorgeous slides, is just unfair to the rest of us.

CJefferson 14y ago

As someone who sees a lot of students start to get into presenting, there is one important thing (in my opinion) to remember. You should certainly aim to present beautiful presentations, with informative and colourful slides, with minimal bullet points and no text dumps. However, make sure you design a presentation you can give. Everything you take off your slides is more information you have to give your audience. When starting out, there is nothing wrong with using slides as a crutch. Some of the worst talks I have ever seen consisted of minimalist slides and a speaker who was just not (yet) capable of presenting completely solo. At least with info-dump slides, I can still follow the presentation by reading the slides!

elisehein 14y ago
In a way though, this could serve as a kind of test for the student beforehand to see which parts they're comfortable with. I recently gave a presentation like this as part of my course and tried to follow the style described in the article. I started out with quite a nice visually appealing set of minimalistic slides, but ended up with a hybrid of that and what you usually see in lectures that also need to serve as handouts for later. So yes, I agree that people giving presentations as part of school projects should be cautious about trying to do more than they are ready for, but I also think it's somewhat a shame that we aren't given enough opportunities to practice that other side of presenting as well.
- CJefferson 14y ago
  I have been trying to increase the amount of practice students get. Irritatingly, many students get very annoyed when asked to give talks for which they will not be graded, which makes it hard to give students the chance to practice in a risk-free (by which I mean mark-free) environment.
saraid216 14y ago
I kind of disagree. I think that, once you start using a crutch, you're almost certainly never going to stop, especially in a perceived-risk-high situation like public speaking. "Info-dump slides worked last time. I'll go with what works again, rather than adding risk by trying to be more minimal," repeat ad infinitum. It's better to recognize that you just didn't prepare enough (didn't practice sufficiently; didn't know your subject well enough; didn't anticipate questions and concerns; etc.) and prepare better next time. It might be a little different in a teacher-student environment where direct guidance is possible and disasters can be coddled and mitigated and explained away as "this is a learning environment; screwing up is okay". Just... don't grade it.

2468ben 14y ago

I made a tutorial in grad school for people who give (mostly technical) presentations: http://www.rustyandfriends.com/powertothepoint http://www.rustyandfriends.com/powertothepoint

mhb 14y ago

inception some ideas into their heads Good god!

idan 14y ago
Not sure if disgusted with creative grammar / neologisms.
- mhb 14y ago
  I'll confirmation that.

iamctodd 14y ago

Hi, I teach a presentation design class at a business school and have developed a tool called the Lean Presenter's Canvas. It is v0.1 (literally released this week) and is based off years of teaching this MBA class as well as working with business professionals on their presentations. It is intended to be a guide to map out a presentation in one page before spending too much time in slideware. Take a look: http://ow.ly/fKxGB http://ow.ly/fKxGB [.pdf] You can learn more and stay up-to-date at: http://leanpresenter.com http://leanpresenter.com We'll post revisions based on usage and feedback as well as offering more tools to help craft and design a presentation (all licensed under Creative Commons). Since we're following a lean approach - feedback is welcome! Cheers, C Todd @iamctodd

iamctodd 14y ago
To clarify - this is a tool meant for understanding your audience and structuring your story before designing any supporting visuals. I have found that when you have the story ironed out, any supporting visuals are much easier to create.

saraid216 14y ago

Something I tend to emphasize is the question of confidence. People always complain about not being confident enough to do a good presentation. I've responded to this by explaining that confidence is built: you know your subject matter, you know where you got your results from, you know your audience, and so on. Experience and chutzpah let you fill in holes, but all of your actual confidence comes from knowing how the communication is going to work.

guiambros 14y ago

While I agree with most of OP's comments for live events, keep in mind frequently presentations are shared, and not really presented. Within typical business scenarios, presentations are forwarded to other people that were not present, so you don't have the benefit of the speaker explaining what that beautiful minimalistic photo of a turtle-in-the-middle-of-the-desert really meant. Even presentations from live events will be on slideshare, frequently without the voice/video track. The examples included on OP's post ratify my point; nice visually, but almost useless when shared without the voice-over. There's no debate that ugly or confusing slides can and should be avoided. But bullet points don't ruin a presentation, you can tell a story one word at a time, and sometimes even info-dump slides have a role to play. See Mary Meeker's crowded presentations. See Steve Jobs's smart use of bullet points. See Lessig's one-word-per-slide style. Bottom line: presentation style is like programming languages: you have to find the best one for the job, and do it beautifully. Understand the audience and the appropriate style, rather than rely on canned rules like "bullets are evil". Code as a craft.

edandersen 14y ago

Garr Reynolds has an excellent blog about giving great, bullet point free Presentations: http://www.presentationzen.com/ http://www.presentationzen.com/ His book, Presentation Zen, comes highly recommended (not a referral link): http://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Zen-Simple-Delivery-Edition/dp/0321811984/ http://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Zen-Simple-Delivery-Editi...

samsolomon 14y ago
Second. I own this book, and it is a must for anyone giving presentations.