What shape is your presentation? Flat? Round? Spiky? It’s an unusual question, but a very effective one for diagnosing the biggest problem affecting most presentations.

PowerPoint often guides us down a bad path from the very start. The built-in templates conform us to a very rigid structure — titles and bullet points on every slide. Essentially, they encourage us to create a series of isolated lists, which is an ineffective way to structure your presentation.

Hills and Heart Rates

Before PowerPoint existed, people thought of presentations as speeches, and we tend to approach speech writing differently from presentation design.

There aren’t any visuals to rely on in a speech, so it’s up to our words to make the content interesting. For this reason, speechwriters focus on the narrative, or the overall structure of the speech.

Speeches are round, like hills. They’re usually in the story-plot structure, which consists of an introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. If we abstractly charted a speech, it would look something like this.

Slide presentations look very different. The standard presentation format (template) encourages us to create an isolated series of lists (titles & bullets), and so we end up presenting our material as just that.

It goes something like this: After our title and intro slides, we toss up a slide with a single topic (e.g. “Competitive Landscape”). We say everything we can about the topic, then move on to the next slide with a new topic (e.g. “Market Size”), where we say everything we can about that. This repeats for about ten to twenty minutes until we come to a slide titled, “Conclusion”, where we abruptly stop talking and ask for questions.

Slide presentations are spiky, like the beeping heart-rate monitors you see in hospitals (EKGs). That spiky shape is the reason so many presentations are so boring to sit through.

Wired to remember

Humans love stories, and we’re all natural storytellers. Every time we chat with friends we’re telling each other stories, and we’re not usually reciting a series of isolated lists to one another.

Our minds are wired to take in and remember round information much better than spiky information. This is why you can remember the details of a famous speech or the plot of a good movie, much easier than you can remember the items on your last grocery list. Your brain processes round information better because round information is saturated with meaning, which is the key requirement for memory formation.

So when you’re working on your next presentation, remember to consider its shape. Bullet points aren’t the problem — the way we’ve grown accustomed to using them is.

Keep it round, avoid the spikes.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss some of the inspiration behind THIRST in an interview with Geetesh Bajaj from the Indezine blog.

View the full interview here.

Indezine is a comprehensive web resource for all things PowerPoint (tutorials, tips, downloads, and more). If you spend a lot of time in PowerPoint, you’ll definitely want to check it out.

I normally don’t like to bring up politics here, but this is a moment worthy of an exception.

History was made last night when Barack Obama won the 2008 US presidential election in a landslide victory. While I disagree with John McCain’s use of negative campaign tactics over the past several months, I congratulate and applaud him for his sincere and graceful concession speech. He nailed it, expressing a caring and appropriate message of unity that you can tell came from his heart.

Barack Obama’s victory speech, delivered to a crowd extending far into the night, was yet another one for the record books. Barack Obama is arguably the best communicator ever to be elected US president. He is an example of the tremendous power a strong, balanced, and confident person has to inspire and lead others. He is, without doubt, a role model to us all.

It is a very exciting time to be an American.

Presentation limitations

Have you ever opened a presentation someone sent you, only to find the text formatting too messed up to read? Chances are, the person who designed the presentation used a custom font you don’t have.

Custom fonts are a great way to make your slides more expressive, but they can cause serious problems when you try sending your presentation to someone else.

Presentation applications (i.e. Keynote and PowerPoint) don’t embed fonts into presentation documents. This means if you’re making a presentation you plan to send to several people, it’s best to use only universal fonts.

In the example below, I designed a simple slide using the custom font Trixie. The version on the left shows what the slide looks like on my computer, a computer with the font installed. The version on the right is the exact same slide, but on my friend’s computer, which does not have the font installed. Notice the difference?

If you use a PC, you don’t have much to worry about — almost all of the fonts that came installed on your computer are universal. If you use a Mac, you have to be a bit more careful. You have several great fonts on your machine that your PC brethren might lack.

Using type effectively is an art and a great way to make your slides more expressive. For presentations you’ll only deliver from your computer, feel free to go nuts using any fonts you want. But for presentations you plan to send to other people, remember to be careful with your font choices.

Note: PowerPoint 2007 for the PC does, in fact, allow you to embed custom fonts into your presentation. First, click “Save” and then click the “Tools” button. Select “Save Options“, and then click the “Embed fonts in the file” check box.

21 great fonts

If you’re interested in learning more about custom fonts, the link below highlights a collection of 21 of the most used fonts by professional designers.

It’s definitely worth checking out if you want to experiment with using a font other than Arial or Calibri in your next presentation.

InstantShift (via Monoscope)

Keeping that fourth wall down.

When a character in a play steps out of a scene and reveals his or her awareness of the audience, it’s called, “breaking the fourth wall”. The fourth wall is the imaginary wall that normally separates the characters on stage from the audience in the theater.

In a presentation, you should be breaking the fourth wall the entire time. After all, you’re directly addressing an audience.

In fact, you never want to build a fourth wall during a presentation. That is, you never want to ignore your audience and start talking to yourself.

It sounds funny, but people talk to themselves during presentations all the time. We’ve all seen it, and most of us are guilty of having done it. It happens most often when something goes wrong.

Stop yourself from muttering little comments under your breath (e.g. “Oops. Hold on. What just happened?”). As awkward as it can feel on stage, it looks much more professional to pause silently for a few seconds when you need to regain your bearings.

Avoid talking about your presentation tools (e.g. “How do you use this remote?” “Is this video working?”). And, most importantly, don’t face your slides as you talk. Your slides didn’t come to see you speak, your audience did.

Learn to always keep your audience in mind, keep that fourth wall down, and you’ll immediately see a major improvement in your presentation delivery.

Great presentation design starts with the right approach.

The digital dilemma

How do you begin making a presentation? Most people start digital. They sit at their computer, open up Microsoft PowerPoint, choose a shnazzy theme, and start churning out titles and bullet points. A few hours (and several clipart images) later, the presentation is “complete”.

Unfortunately, this method often leads to the boring presentations we’re all used to. It puts the emphasis on your bullet points instead of the story you’re telling.

Effective slides emphasize the important messages in a presentation. They don’t double as a giant TelePrompTer to read from. Remember, bullet points are not talking points.

The right foot

Instead, try starting analog. Grab a pen and paper, find a comfortable place to work, and dedicate an hour or two to brainstorming your presentation away from the computer.

Consider these questions: What’s the purpose of your presentation? Why were you asked to speak? What does the audience expect? What does the audience already know? What’s your main point? What’s your most important message? Why should your audience care?

Initially, pretend your presentation will be a speech without slides. Sketch out some talking points for how you’d deliver that speech. How would you frame your content to make it compelling? What stories would you share to emphasize your message?

After you’ve put your ideas down on paper, then start thinking about your slides. What sort of visuals will enhance your message? Approach each slide as a blank canvas, not just a space to list your talking points.

Starting analog yields better results because it helps you focus on the story you’re telling, instead of lists of bullet points.

I like starting with a pen and paper because it gives me the freedom to write haphazardly and sketch pictures at the same time. If sketching isn’t your thing, a word processor works fine too. The point is just to avoid presentation software and slide templates at first.

Give the analog approach a try. Keep your focus on the story you’re telling and you’ll be surprised by how much better your next presentation turns out.

The results are in, and I am thrilled to announce my recent presentation, THIRST, was selected as the best presentation in the 2008 World’s Best Presentation Contest on SlideShare.net!

THIRST is an educational presentation designed to spark the conversation around the impending world freshwater shortage. I’m proud to report it’s working. Since it was first released just two months ago, THIRST has spread across the web and has been viewed over 60,000 times.

This year’s World’s Best Presentation Contest attracted 2,415 presentations from over 130 countries across 5 continents. The judges were four top gurus of the presentation world, Guy Kawasaki, Bert Decker, Garr Reynolds, and Nancy Duarte.

It’s truly an honor to have won the contest for a second year in a row. I extend a warm thank you to everyone who showed their support.

Jeff -

They say a photo is worth a thousand words, and a good chart is worth a million numbers. There’s no denying the fact our brains are wired to understand visuals better and faster than numbers.

I ran across this super-creative visualization online last week and was blown away. The chart depicts US movie box office numbers for every opening weekend in 2008 (it’s still being updated over time).

This is a brilliant visualization because it does exactly what a great chart should do — it conveys an enormous amount of information, all of the relationships within a huge set of data, instantly.

Nothing about this chart is creative just for creativity’s sake. All of its features, from the colors to the shapes, make it more effective at telling its story.

Makes an ordinary bar chart seem kind of dull, doesn’t it?

Check it out here.

Visualization by Zach Beane (via swiss-miss)

The big debate

Which are better, light or dark slide backgrounds?

Surprisingly, designers are engaged in a heated debate over this question; each side claiming one style is easier to read than the other.

The difference in readability matters for texty mediums such as magazines and websites, but is comparatively irrelevant for your slides, as they only contain a few words each.

So, should you make your backgrounds light or dark? The answer depends on the context of your presentation and the tool you use to display it. In this entry, I offer some tips to help you decide which style will be most effective for your next presentation.

Lights + Projector = Dull visuals

Ever wonder why it’s always dark in a movie theater? Projectors can’t make the color black. A black pixel from a projector is really just a small shadow.

Projected images always look better with the lights off because any ambient light in the room fills in those shadows, reducing the contrast ratio between the light and dark pixels and making the dark colors in your slides look dull.

While we usually think of projectors when we think about presentations, people actually use a variety of tools to display their slideshows. Many modern boardrooms have replaced projectors with large, wall-mounted televisions. Traveling sales reps often present to clients from their laptop screens. I’ve even worked with clients who print their slides on heavy card-stock and flip through the cards manually as they deliver their speeches.

Going dark

Dark slide backgrounds look best on electronic displays (e.g. computer screens, televisions, etc).

If you’re using a dark background on a projector, you’ll need to make sure the room has good presentation lighting. That doesn’t mean turning all the lights off — nothing encourages nap time more than a meeting in the dark. Good presentation lighting just means there’s darkened area for the projector screen.

Dark slide backgrounds are also a strategic choice for long presentations, such as all-day seminars or workshops. When slides are too bright, I’ve heard audiences at these events complain they feel as though they’ve been staring at a lightbulb all day.

Going light

Light slide backgrounds are just the opposite.

First off, they’re much more versatile. Since light backgrounds are brighter, they look good coming from just about any quality display or projector, in any kind of room lighting. Additionally, they’re ideal for printed presentations since they tend to use a lot less ink.

Solid-white backgrounds make it super easy to add beautiful, dynamic images to your slides. A huge percentage of stock photos portray an object floating over a white background (these are called “isolated images”). A white slide background enables you to seamlessly incorporate these images into your presentation without wasting time in Photoshop cropping out the image backgrounds.

Ultimately there are no steadfast rules for which style to use, just a few flexible guidelines to help you make the best choice for your next presentation. Experiment with different styles, and as always, be creative with it.