Presentation Design - The death of key points

When was the last time you went to the presentation and came away impressed with the slides?

This is, of course, the fashion these days to talk negatively about PowerPoint, and like most on-screen presentations to the public to "death" with an attack of a bullet point bits of words after another. It 'also true that the same people who like to throw often create mind-numbing PowerPoint program themselves, and then claim that it is not their fault - their bosses make them create slides that transform the brain with butter.

Even if entrepreneurs are pretty much stuck with PowerPoint these days, and probably will for the foreseeable future, there have been few pioneers out there who are trying to change the ways we use the slides to convey information or to persuade others to see things our way. And so, even if PowerPoint is still very much alive and well, we think that the bullets as builders of knowledge could be convicted, some cutting-edge designers are looking for new forms and structures.

A person whose work you should know if it is not already Cliff Atkinson. According to Michael McLaughlin, coauthor with Jay Conrad Levinson of Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants, "Cliff Atkinson believes he has built a better mousetrap He wants us to dump the tedious, bullet-riddled slides, and has a creative solution:. It beats Hollywood narrative style to transform your PowerPoint presentations with endless lists of bullets in communications compelling. "

Beyond the fundamental points of the book by Atkinson shows you how to use the power of storytelling to make PowerPoint presentations effective communication tools, not only the speaker notes. With the Atkinson method, not only to produce presentations that are not boring, but it was also forced to think about what he is saying in a way that all viewers are for: to tell them a story.

It should also be aware of Lawrence Lessig, who created a buzz over the past two years with what he believes is a design "minimalist" approach to presentation. It 's interesting, and definitely worth getting up to speed on it if you're in the business presentation. The best example of this style that we have seen is in a keynote address given by a guy named Dick Hardt. You really need to see this performance to appreciate its power as an antidote to the common corporate presentation. Here's a link: identity20.com/media/OSCON2005.

The problem I have with this approach is that, while his followers believe minimalist, because there is usually no more than a word or image on the screen at a time, virtually every word in the narrative is projected, so that with a little 'practice, the presenter simply offers a fully pre-written scripts. It 's interesting to watch and definitely keeps your attention throughout, but rather than put the presenter at the center of the process, the result is that 99% of public attention is drawn to the screen.

The really scary thing is that you probably will have great appeal for newgens and young people who unfortunately have no idea how to relate to another human being except through the interface of an electronic device. So this is the presentation of video-game / hip hop / text-message-me-from-the-end-of-the-bar. The presentation is the screen, and the presenter receives praise for its ability to design electronic, rather than its ability to be human.

Of course, the Master of the Universe PowerPoint here has not been sleeping with the switch for the past two years, this year you will see the world premiere of what we're offering as a new design language of presentation, with its own strict grammar, all based on the use of minimalism to focus the public's presenter.

We have not yet decided how to label it ("Beyond Bullet Points" is already taken, and "useless" does not sound much value added). Internally we refer to it as the language of the hole because we use vertical lines (bars) instead of bullets and levels off set paragraph and also omen is the presenter and the audience as much (if any) follow on-screen after the revelation last.

It 's happened to us some time ago that, while the bullets do the work for starting a huge group of words of another huge group (' points' the 3-line are used to seeing), does not make much sense when you are what you should do and never more than a few words on each line. The same line triggers the single point from the next. So if you're using PowerPoint properly, ie, simply the public key of the key where you're going and what you're about to say, the bullets are superfluous. Bonus: the slides look much cleaner without them.

Back to this new presentation language: Although Atkinson and Lessig points less than, we believe that rather than throwing out the structure of all, there are increases in both understanding and retention when the presentation conforms to a predictable set of rules - a grammar, if you want. We believe that when the grammar predicts what will happen (in a haiku, for example, you know exactly how many words are coming next), you create both expectation and increased the comfort of knowing how much RAM you have to book the brain.

Long term readers know we are committed to showing the world that PowerPoint (and Keynote from Apple, which we used recently) is not the problem. We do not know if this is the answer, but we know that will really like what you see....