Presentation Advice from an Expert

The Wired How-to Wiki has a good article on delivering dynamic presentations based on the advice of Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design. Duarte Design consults on executive presentations and keynotes, the most notable would be the presentation Al Gore delivers in An Inconvenient Truth.

Advice includes the tried and true, know your audience and memorize your message. The importance of this latter point shouldn't be confused with mistaking presenting by rote. Presenting should be a learning process, including learning from the audience so each time the presenter delivers similar material, he or she is better prepared for audience feedback and questions.

Some technical details worth noting, use 24pt or larger type, which can be seen in the An Inconvenient Truth presentation. As most of us don't have the time or ability to create high quality animations, high quality images, particularly photos, are a good alternative.

For those that build slide decks as a substitute for a memo, per corporate culture: This advice shouldn't go out the window in those instances, but slides have to be denser than Al Gore's example. Since they will be read rather than presented, they need to stand on their own. Still, Al Gore's presentation does stand on its own.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx. 

Comments

[Maria Tseng]

Hi Michael, I sent you email commenting on this blogpost. Hope your servers haven't filtered out messages from gmail.

Thanks.
Maria Tseng