The SlidePost

In May we had the first TEDx event held in Moscow, Russia. It was a great honour to offer my help with the slides and structure to some of the speakers. Here’s a sample of what I did.

Before:

After:

Quite unlike Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stays true to Death by PowerPoint. Here’s a slide from his recent presentation. Semi-translucent 3d charts with reflection should either look stunning… or not. Why oh why do we need the table on the same slide? And FOB stands for “Full of bullet points”, as you all know. Well done, Microsoft.

Have you seen the new, reformed Bill Gates? Seems like he finally surrendered to the almighty powers of Slide Simplicity. Was:

Now:

Whoa.

The presentation I wrote last year for Mercator became a finalist at the New York Advertising Festival. I don’t think my work here is particularly great; that was before Robert McKee’s seminar and I did not know much about scriptwriting at the time, but hey… I have to admit I am still happy. To date this is my first award for anything related to presentations.

That’s a cool new effect called “magic move” from Keynote’09. I think it’s a great way to go into the details, and what’s best — it takes just a couple of clicks to do set it up.

Our latest project which involved extensive travelling to China, Romania and Sierra Leone is complete. (more details). I was co-authoring the scenario conducting the interviews and managing the team (which most of the time did not need any managing). 10 minutes. We had 7 tapes 40 minutes each just from China alone. Saying just 5% of what you know is a secret to a good presentation.

Have you seen yesterday’s Apple event? This slide was used by Steve Jobs repeatedly during the presentation of the latest Apple notebooks. This is an excellent slide, the only problem is that the slide has no meanining whatsoever in the context of the presentation and thus absolutely no value. What the hell is this, Steve? Why on Earth do I need to know this before buying your notebook? Why is that important?

And also, Steve. You are well famous for explaining technical terms in plain language. I don’t know who exactly came up with it, but “1000 songs in your pocket” was just precious. You established the golden standard for everyone. Why oh why were you talking about gigaflops this time? Please stop before my clients start going “Steve Jobs is doing this and so will I”.

I will be in NYC from October 23 to November 10 visiting workshops on scriptwriting, improv theater and standup. So if you want to meet and talk — let me know.

Authenticity is something that is very easy to loose once you start doing something. I have great respect for people at Ethos, their Meet Henry is iconic. But this one is overproduced. Too slick. Inauthentic.