Steve Jobs: Two quick observations

Two things:

1. Is it me, or does Steve Jobs look ill? I don’t remember ever seeing him look so skinny. He’s skin and bones. What gives?

2. I don’t know if Steve Jobs even uses Powerpoint*, but whatever. He knows how to convey his message in one slide without getting into a buttload of tables and graphs and bullets. Look how simple his slide is. I love that.

* Thanks to cdmwebs, I now know that Apple’s answer to Powerpoint is called Keynote. How did I not know that? Um… I’m a Microsoft guy. Give me a break already. See? I learned something on Twitter today.

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Fixing Death by Powerpoint: The Presentation

I guess I’ve always been a decent communicator. Not great, but occasionally good, and most of the time decent. One area that I could improve upon is my powerpoint design skills. Sure, I can present just about anything well with the help of powerpoint, but actually DESIGNING a presentation (slides, content, narrative, etc.) in such a way as to captivate, engage and delight… eh, not so much. Just like many of you, I have mostly settled for creating slides that presented data and organized talking points with bullets.

And yes, I am guilty of using mostly boring backgrounds, when I should instead work on creating one effective and kickass slide after the other.

All of this is in the process of changing. I have started creating and filing what will someday become a pretty hefty collection of ready-to-use Powerpoint silver bullets. The goal: cut my powerpoint design times down to almost nothing while producing cool, sticky presentations.

Well… that’s the goal anyway.

To see where I am going with this, click on Alexei Kapterev’s “Death By Powerpoint” presentation (top of post). For a completely original (and definitely non-corporate) use of powerpoint, click on Blaine Cook’s eComm 2008 presentation below.

Good stuff. (And yes, I dig Slideshare a lot.)

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Rethinking the way we use Powerpoint

From infosthetics.com:

Research at the University of NSW, Sydney, Australia, claims the human brain processes & retains more information if it is digested in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time. more of the passages would be understood & retained if heard or read separately. “The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster,” Professor Sweller said. “It should be ditched.”

“It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind & decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.”

This new insight clearly puts the recent report about using Powerpoint in Parliament speeches in a new perspective.

Interesting.

Some of the best powerpoint presentations I’ve seen so far have been extremely simple. They tended to focus on images, words and data so iconic, so clear, so easily understood in seconds that they a) almost required no input from the presenter and b) could have been framed and use as artwork. Slides with ten bullet-points and sub bullet points just put me to sleep. Bleh bleh bleh… bleh… blehhhhhhhhhh…

Do yourselves a favor and go to presentationzen.com. Learn something today… like ways to a) communicate better with ppt. and b) stop boring your audience to death. (Thank you.)

Related reading: The PDF, smh.com

To leave comments (and read previous, related posts) hit the brandbuilder’s main page.

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