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.
Seth Godin is one of the very few people who can illustrate blog posts with pictures that actually add something. Most of the time people use the same plastic photos from StockExchange which add just visual noise — all because someone told them that they need to “keep visual”. This is lame. But Seth — Seth is different. He creates diagrams. Here’s one from his recent piece:
The same applies to slide design. If you want to do it sucessfully, either do it slick or don’t do it at all. White background, black Arial font — fine. Black background, white Courier font (think Lawrence Lessig) — fine. Blue background with stars and stripes, 3 different fonts in 4 colors plus some cheesy wordart — inauthentic, low-frequency, single-digit, lame and just plain ugly.
And of course it’s hard to be slick, it takes time and practice and you do a lot of ugly things on your way there. This is all not to discourage you from doing “design”, this is just for you to realise that most of the time you (and me!) are stuck between “real” and “slick”. We seek for more sophistication — but we are mostly not sophisticated enought. Yet.
I am currently involved in a project for an aluminium producer with lots of travel. I’ve just got back from Romania, going next to Sierra Leone and China. Updates therefore might be a bit erratic.
The slide is not bad at all, especially after you’ve seen the process all by yourself. The numbers are quite useless here, of course.
Another excellent outline slide, this time from a very stylish church strategy presentation. Yes. A church strategy presentation.
The three visual metaphors are very clear.
I think that’s an excellent slide. I was not able to re-create it despite its apparent simplicity as I don’t have the exact font. But I still like it. Sure it has a lot of text, but this is a sort of “contents slide”, it is repeated several times throuh the presentation so you have plenty of time to read. And its VERY easy to read: the font is just SUPER large. It’s 96 or something. Another thing is that even trivial fonts look beautiful when enlarged. They just do.
The font has to be quite narrow though to fit. This one looks like DIN 1451, which is used for roadsigns widely. I don’t think you have it, but you can create about the same effect with Arial Narrow.
The author is Jesse Robbins and his talk is called DisasterTech. Noble cause as well.
Sometimes I see people using rather crudely drawn stick figures or misshaped and pixelised user icons taken from, I don’t know, Google Image Search? I think abstract depictions are cool. But if you are using them anyway, why not do it nicely?
Draw a triangle, smooth the edges (Keynote: either by double clicking them, or by going Format –> Shape -> Smooth Path), add a circle representing head and then some nice colors. Next just clone as needed:
Silhouettes. Easy to find, look great. Give a slide that impersonal feel you need sometimes. Shorts would be a bit more challenging to draw though.
