Thoughts When a Car Alarm Goes Off

Here’s a Monday morning funny, courtesy of GraphJam:

Laptop Battery Life

GraphJam is a humorous web site where people upload funny visual aids. For example, how long does the battery in your laptop last?

Add Some Polish to That Presentation

Check out a great before and after shot of a set of PowerPoint slides. The number of slides barely changed, but right from the beginning, you can see how awesome and eye-catching the second presentation is going to be.

Before:

After:

Hat tip to Olivia Mitchell.

Authors@Google: Garr Reynolds

If you have an hour or so over your lunch today, you should watch this presentation from Garr Reynolds. This is what a great integration of public speaking and visual slides looks like.

An Interesting Visual Aid

Jex Condom sales in Japan:

I’m not sure whether to be appalled by the creativity or applaud the creativity.

Tip (so to speak) to Garr Reynolds.

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

We discussed this rule last week in class, but here is an explanation from Guy Kawasaki himself.

Don’t be a bozo.

Four Things You Cannot Recover

Randy Alcorn posted this great set of pictures on his blog that are a great devotional and an example of great design. Look how simple the pictures are, yet communicate so much, and notice how the black-and-white half-and-half look separate each half of each quote.

Sometimes Reading Your Presentation Is OK!

Actually, that was a lie. It’s not. You can read this and see what the author thinks, but he’s wrong.

Unless you’re on the radio, a voice actor, or you’re briefly quoting someone else’s written work, you shouldn’t be reading, and no offense, but if I see you do it in class, prepare to be heckled.

UPDATE: The author has clarified that he doesn’t believe that live presentations should be read, only when reading from an article or book. That point was unclear to me, since it was near the end of the post, but the point was made.

Still, if you write your presentation on a PowerPoint slide and then read directly off the slide, be prepared for your audience to read faster than you can talk and then tune out the rest of what you have to say since they read it already.

The Difference Between Art and Design

A great article from the Web Designer’s Depot on how design works in a way that seems less like you’re being artistic (because some people may feel that they are not artistic at all and may settle on creating bland slides) and more like you’re communicating visually with your audience (which anyone can really do with a little thought and effort).

The magic of this is really not magic at all. You can come up with slides that look just like these if you think ahead of time what you want to say, how long your audience is going to look at it, and what the real message you’re trying to communicate is.

How Many Slides? An Answer

From Nancy Duarte and her blog, how many slides do you need in a presentation? Garr Reynolds helps her answer the question.

I’m in agreement with Garr. How many slides do you need in a presentation? It depends.

There’s also a good video (#3) on that page that gives you idea on whether or not you should give people handouts of your PowerPoints. My advice: never do it until after your presentation. Otherwise, your audience will be reading along, flipping through pages, creating a real visual and audio distraction, and never engaging with you.

Some things that were mentioned quickly at the beginning that you may not be familiar with:

• Pecha Kucha and Ignite: delivery styles where you are allowed only 20 slides and each slide automatically transitions–for pecha kucha, it’s 20 seconds, and for Ignite, it’s 15 seconds.
• Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Rule: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. A 30-point font is not only more readable by everyone in the audience, but it also forces you to put together less wordy slides.

If you have Twitter or an RSS feed, all three of these folks have excellent presentation materials and advice that would be useful to students for presentations in both college and career.