Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte |Book Brief

The book, Slideology, demonstrates how to create visual presentations that not only inform but inspire your audience.

Author and designer Nancy Duarte walks us through the steps toward creating a great presentation.

Nancy Duarte: In an era when corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars on slick advertising and marketing campaigns, why are our presentations still so ineffective and dull? Now, I have nothing against the presentation tools themselves, but frankly most slides are putrid. Slides have become a dumping ground for anything that can serve as a visual crutch for the presenter so they remember what to say. The slides become a distraction that impairs a connection with your audience instead of a tool that connects with them more deeply.

Today, we're going to discuss some of the proven ways to create a visual presentation that will capture and inspire your audience. Before you start creating a presentation, you need to ask yourself, Am I creating a document or a presentation? Is it going to be more important that they listen or more effective if they read? Because if a slide contains more than 75 words, you made a document. Well, it's a document posing as a slide. Unfortunately, slides-as-document is the most common use and can make great ideas fizzle into mediocrity. True presentations, on the other hand, will reinforce the content visually rather than create distraction, and this allows the audience to comfortably engage.

Now that we know what qualifies as a great presentation, let's look at how to make it the very best it can be.

Most of the success of a presentation stems from how well it resonates the audience -- reaching the audience isn't going to happen by accident! You need to understand your audience's various needs, concerns, and fears, and then build trust and establish an emotional or logical connection with them. One great way to understand your audience is to create a persona of them that identifies who they are and how they tick. Creating a persona slide helps you take a walk in their shoes so you can determine what they need from you.

For example, Ken and Kerry are baby boomers and they're planning to attend an investment seminar. Ask yourself What does their life look like? What motivates them? And answer questions like what keeps them up at night? And how might they resist? You can even find a picture that you feel looks like your typical audience and put it into your persona slide. You can draw inferences about their needs, their hopes, their fears and this exercise helps speak to these points during your presentation.

Usually the reason we present in the first place is to spread ideas, not read slides. But expressing ideas visually can be challenging because ideas are invisible.

The best place to start is most likely not at the computer. Presentation software isn't structured for brainstorming. A pencil and a sheet of paper will do just nicely. Sticky notes and a sharpie are even better. Our goal is to generate ideas, lots of ideas. Often ideas come immediately, which is great, but avoid the pitfall of going with the very first thing that comes to mind. The goal here is to generate an enormous amount of ideas and as many as possible. Continue to generate ideas even if they seem to wander down unrelated paths. Once you've generated an enormous amount of ideas, identify a handful that will resonate with the audience. Spend your creative energy here because the pay-off will be a presentation that people will not only remember, but will inspires them to action.

To succeed as a presenter, you must think like a designer and all the remove visual distraction from your slides. Designers make very intentional decisions about where elements are placed and how their eye is going to flow across the slide. All the decisions you make when building slides are a reflection of your personal aesthetic taste and your ability to convey a point. So the images you choose, they should look like they hang together well and not be a hodge-podge of pictures you found on a quick internet search (you wouldn't leave the house with a crumpled shirt and mis-matched socks would you?) How you choose elements, how you arrange them, animate them, it could make or break your next high-stakes presentation. Once you've established a visual family of elements, it's important that they are arranged in a way that takes into account the principles of hierarchy, flow, contrast, proximity and white space.

Also, please use animation only if it adds meaning to the content. elements that twitch, bounce and buzz, they're going to create distraction from the message you're trying to convey.

Finally, practice your presentation until the interaction you have with your slides is seamless. There are concepts in the book that will get into your head and dramatically change the way you approach your next presentation. Thanks so much for reading Slide:ology.