bloggingprof 2b's List: Great Presentation Pointers

• Learning from Bill Gates & Steve Jobs

  • Excellent post on the visual and audio of a good presentation.
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• the Heath brothers found that sticky messages have six key attributes in common: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories
• Steve's tone, pace, and the words he chooses all come together to make his "voice" conversational and natural. Steve appears comfortable, smiles, and uses humor just the right amount. He's relaxed so the audience is relaxed. Bill appears less comfortable and his speech is more vague and filled with abstractions. Bill also uses more jargon and terms like "...rich capabilities," "rich fonts," "...working together in a rich way," "...use these tools in a rich way," and "...watching something rich like learning about an election."

  • This is perhaps the reason I can watch Steve's presentations and feel enthralled, but I yawn my way halfway through one of Bills.
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• Steve's visuals are a big part of his talk. The visuals are necessary not decorative. The visuals do not overpower him but they are an important component of the talk not just icing on the cake. Steve uses the slides to help him tell a story and he interacts with them in a natural way, rarely turning his back on the audience (monitors in front show the same onscreen image). Steve uses the huge backlit screen behind him in the same spirit at least that George Lucas uses his screen: to help tell a story. Lucas uses actors, visuals, and effects to convey his message, Steve uses visuals and his own words and natural presence to tell his story.
• Bill's topic/subtopic bullet point style is very common, very bland, and rarely effective.

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• Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic

  • Another great post on the good and bad of presentation visuals
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• "Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means."
                                   — Dr. Koichi Kawana
• Graphic designers show restraint by including only what is necessary to communicate the particular message for the particular audience. Restraint is hard. Complication and elaboration are easy...and are common.
• "The designer must adhere to the concept of miegakure since Japanese believe that in expressing the whole the interest of the viewer is lost."
                                    — Dr. Koichi Kawana

• The Zen aesthetic values include (but are not limited to):   

    
  • Simplicity
    
  • Subtlety
    
  • Elegance
    
  • Suggestive rather than the descriptive or obvious
    
  • Naturalness (i.e., nothing artificial or forced),
    
  • Empty space (or negative space)
    
  • Stillness, Tranquility
    
  • Eliminating the non-essential
• Steve Jobs, allows the screen to fade completely empty at appropriate, short moments while he tells his story.
• For most presenters a crowded slide is a crutch, or at least a security blanket

  • No more crutches! Think minimal! This may mean more overall slides, but it would be worth it for better presentations.
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• Good graphic design guides the viewer and has a clear hierarchy or order so that she knows where to look first, second, and so on
• Atkinson says that "...bullet points create obstacles between presenters and audiences." He correctly claims that bullets tend to make our presentations formal and stiff, serve to "dumb down" our points, and lead to audiences being confused...and bored. Rather than running through points on a slide, Atkinson recommends presenters embrace the art of storytelling, and that visuals (slides) be used smoothly and simply to enhance the speaker's points as he tells his story.

  • All of this is common in student presentations. Can we teach them better methods in the period of time that it takes to talk about presentations?
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