I’ve had to sit though some presentations recently where when it came to visuals, the presenters took cramming information in the audience’s face to a whole new level. One one projector, we had the slide deck and on the other, a demo. Pretty innocuous there, outside the typical excess text and map shock-laden diagrams. What [...]
Oh, the last month. Preparing for a presentation that could determine the fate of a 2+ year long project required a ton of preparation. When preparing for a presentation of that magnitude, all of the best practices for effective slide design become that much more important. The hard work of several people over many months [...]
If you’re like me, you probably subscribe to either MacWorld Magazine or Mac Life. Over the past several months, I’ve seen the ads for the Targus AMP11US Bluetooth Presenter for Mac from Targus. In the ad, it’s a thing of beauty. It seems to be designed to compliment the MacBook Pro and it has all [...]
Last week, I attended the Open Government & Innovations Conference in DC where thousands, it seems, of feds got together to pretend they’re out-innovating the private sector in the use of Web 2.0 and social media and the implementation of transparency. The keynotes and break-out sessions all suffered from the same problem: detachment from the [...]
For my previous slide make-over, I gave a slide deck presented by the Coast Guard at a Web 2.0 workshop. This facelift targets a deck presented by the EPA at the same workshop. The issues were different this time and unfortunately, the “Greenversations At A Glance” slide deck was typical of what I see on [...]
PowerPoint’s been around longer than the World Wide Web easily by a country mile. When use of the Web became popular, URLs started invading slide decks. Sometimes they were inserted so the audience could write them down later, or if the slides were abused as handouts, the thought was they could be copied into the [...]
If you’re like me, you probably watched Apple’s WWDC Keynote when the video was posted. I had already followed the major announcements earlier in the day, so I took the opportunity to watch Phil Schiller’s much improved performance and marvel at the visuals on the screen. Watching this video, I also saw something I didn’t [...]
We’ve all heard it before. “They want to hear what you have to say.” So often, little effort is put into preparing a presentation because it’s just assumed that because the audience is there, they’ll be hanging on every last word you have to say. In many instances, that’s a dangerous assumption to make. If [...]
We’ve seen these people. They’re all over the place. In some organizations, it’s institutionalized. What I’m concerned about is the laser pointer. Not everyone uses them, but I don’t see anyone standing up and pleading for these people with frickin’ lasers in their hands to stop. It seems, at least in my stomping grounds, that [...]
This last week, I got to give a presentation in the office. Time to get the conference room set up was short, but the slides were ready and I had practiced ahead of time. It was one of those days where there were back-to-back meetings with other responsibilities keeping me running around. It happens. It [...]
“Get your presentation, complete with slides done this afternoon. You need to present tomorrow morning.” I’m sure we’ve all had this thrown on us. Slap something together and deliver it. PowerPoint’s easy to use, so why would you need more than an afternoon, right? How about a whole day to make a slide deck “more [...]
