Killer Presentations

Always on the lookout for new and better way on displaying complex information, this infographic from 5W Graphics gives a better understanding of how certain airlines keep their prices down. If you have any other infographics or would like to share some of your own please send them to me to post.

Jeff Monday, author of Mondaydots.com, gives us a great way of visualizing complex problems, concepts, issues, solutions, or whatever in the form of dots.

The use of dot's encourage the presenter to follow a follow some of PresentationZen and Slideology fundamentals such as Restraint, Simplicity and Naturalness. By only using Dot's the presenter is encouraged to ensure lot's of Clean Space to allow the audience to focus on the movement, action or story of the dots. There also needs to be a sense of Harmony in the presentation by letting the dots tell the story as opposed to bullet points, clip art or other notorious 'death-by-powerpoint' elements.

Finally, I believe dots is an excellent method of communication because of the inherent simplicity of a dot(s) and its ability to convey potentially complex messages in a more easily understandable manner.

I look forward to your comments.

Richard Branson's PitchTV is a place for opportunity for entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas directly to the audience of Virgin Galactic passengers via a two minute video pitch. The pitches are quite interesting, and are the top five as selected by the online community. The pitches show different styles and approaches from using just slides, still images, video, typography and multimedia. My favorite is the gradroom pitch, simple and easy to understand, anyone else?

Great presentation on the secrets of simplicity by Giles Colborne. Giles comes from a web design and user interface point of view, but I think his points are valid for presenting as well:
1. Remove Features (cut down the noise / clutter)
2. Hide Features (does everything need to be on your slide?)
3. Group Features (chunk your information for easier consumption)
4. Displace Features (can you use images to place the story in their minds)

The other part of this presentation that I really like, apart from the content, is the style which Giles uses. His slides are not cluttered with bullet points, lists or clip art but rather quotes, images, and statements. To compensate for having no audio he uses post-it note like stickers on the slides for the viewer to read. All in all a killer presentation.

Tell me what your thoughts are...

Here is a presentation on Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds, at an Apply Store in Japan in Feb 08. For those that don't know Garr, he's the author of the book and blog Presentation Zen, both of which I suggest you read if you interested in improving your presentation skills. I'll be refering to Garr a lot! 

I particlarly like this little clip as it gives you a quick overview and understanding of the Presentation Zen philosophy. In essence, Zen is about simplicity and as Garr explains "achievement of maximum effect with minimum means", the sort of "ultimate less is more...".

The presentation highlights three things, first, that the skill of presenting is a killer skill, one that is sadly absent in most presentations and instead replaced with Death-By-Powerpoint. Death-by-powerpoint has been experienced by most of us i.e. heavily loaded slides, bullet lists, text overload, no point or story, bad color combinations,..., in all what we get is confusion, boredom and a sense of wasted time. When what we really want is clarity, meaning and content.

The second thing is that Presentations should, based upon the philosophy of zen, be based on the following key ideas:

• Restraint, when you prepare remember that you only have 20 minutes to present! No more.
• Simplicity, see if you can cut out some of the stuff on your slides, people can't read & listen at the same time, and
• Naturalness, not easy for the uninitiated, but a presentatioin should have a certain ease of delivery. Think Steve Jobs.

• Simplicity
• Clarity, and
• Uncluttered - opposite to decoration