Paul Pettengill

Clay (two posts in a row for him) dropped on me that I should check out this blog called Presentation Zen. Well I went into my bookstore about a month ago and picked up this great book. Then I read the book in about a day (maybe two). Its obviously a pretty quick read.     

Let me just say this book changed my life. I was so inspired by this book that I created a presentation to introduce a new product for my company using the techniques. Let me start by taking a step back. For those of you who haven’t seen a ton of powerpoint presentations, let me say that 95% are mindnumbingly bad. There is even a phrase for this, its called “Death by PowerPoint”. Garr taught me that it didn’t have to be this way.

I think the biggest thing is that these presentations shouldn’t be all about the text. I know you’ve probably been through them, but the typical powerpoint has slide after slide of text all in your corporate template. Bullet points are a big favorite. One issue is that when a presentation is being given, people naturally read the bullet points, and ignore the presenter. Another issue is that presenters end up reading their own slides quite a bit, so the slides act as a crutch to help them remember what they were going to say. All of this deludes from the message itself.

Garr gives some great tips about creating presentations, including the fact that in order to do it well, you need to start away from the computer sketching your concepts out. He also recommends very little text, and an emphasis on communicating concepts through pictures. In fact there is a link to some free and discounted stock photography in the back of his book, which I used to help create the presentation that I did after reading his book.

Of course after having read the book, I started reading Garr’s blog. What do you know, but he came to San Francisco just a little over a week after I read his book (this is one of those times that I love that I moved here). He was giving a talk at SlideShare (a cool site which allows you to upload your presentations onto the internet), with none other than Nancy Duarte (who knows a thing or two about good presentations as her firm did all the visuals for An Inconvenient Truth). Besides being a kick ass presentation by the two of them, they also both stayed well after the talk. Which was really great, as I definitely enjoyed the great exchange of ideas that took place.

In fact you can see Garr and I on this picture that was originally posted on his blog, here is the link to that post . I’m the one in the striped pink shirt. Yes, I wear pink in San Francisco, what’s your point?

This is all well and good, I’m sure you’re thinking, but the proof is in the proverbial pudding. Well, I’m with you there. So to that end, I loaded my most recent presentation up onto Slideshare, whose corporate offices I visited when I met Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte. One of the great things about the new presentation style, is that you don’t really get my presentation by looking at my slides. Its only through my story telling that you can really understand what my presentation represents. So while I was speaking to one of the co-founders of SlideShare Rashmi Sinha (who was quite gracious for organizing the event and giving away beer and cool t-shirts), she told me of a mashup that puts slideshare together with video in order to see them side by side, as you would at a presentation itself. This mashup is done by a site called Omnisio. So I’m going to record myself giving a dry run of the presentation itself, load that up to YouTube, and go to Omnisio to match the timing of the slides with when I want them to show up.