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Check out this presentation I created and entered into this year’s “World’s Best Presentation Contest” on SlideShare.net. The contest attracts entries from all across the world on a myriad of topics and is a great source for design inspiration. This year there are some very creative entries, so be sure to check them out and vote for the ones you like best. You can vote for THIRST by visiting this page.

THIRST is an educational presentation that explores humanity’s water use and the emerging worldwide water shortage—topics I deeply believe people need to be aware of. I designed it to function as a stand-alone presentation, which means the slides tell the full story (no need for person to deliver it). I’d love to hear what you think. Enjoy!

World’s Best Presentation Contest

Dazed and confused

I’m sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a dimly lit room. A projector screen is reflecting royal blue while a voice drones from up on stage. Bullet points. I know I should be paying closer attention to this presentation, but my brain just can’t focus.

I look around the room and see I’m not the only one drifting. The eyes of the woman seated two rows behind me are staring straight ahead, glazed. Her mind is somewhere far from here. The man on my right has totally jumped ship—he’s halfway through a game of Blackberry Solitaire.

The only one in the room who doesn’t seem to be drifting is the presenter on stage. In fact, he seems to be smiling. This poor guy is contently working through his slides, oblivious to the fact his audience has abandoned him.

How does this happen? How can this guy not realize his presentation is so boring? I know he can hear himself speaking, the problem is he’s just not listening.

“Hearing” happens in your ears. “Listening” happens in your brain. Listen to yourself from the mindset of your audience and you’ll notice a dramatic improvement in your presentation skills.

Listening is an active process that involves asking the right questions at the right times. In delivery, you want to focus your listening on two areas: “what you’re saying” and “how you’re saying it”.

1. What you’re saying

Question to ask yourself: Does this make sense?

If I start speaking in Spanish to an audience of non-Spanish speakers, I’m obviously going to lose their attention pretty fast. The same thing happens in a complicated presentation.

You’re the expert. You’ve taken the time to do your research—immersing yourself in your content for days, weeks, maybe even months. Steeping in your content and its associated lingo for so long makes it easy to fall into “expert-speak” mode.

Unless you’re presenting exclusively to other experts, expert-speak mode is something to avoid. Things that make sense to you will fall flat with your audience since they don’t necessarily know all the things you know.

It’s your job to simplify and explain your content in such a way that it makes sense to your audience.

2. How you’re saying it

Question to ask yourself: Is this interesting?

This one is a bit more subjective and a bit more difficult. “Interesting” is different for everyone.

Think back to a great teacher in your life, someone you learned a lot from. For me, one such person was my 9th grade English teacher. He was able get a bunch of high school kids revved up about Shakespeare and grammar because he knew how to relate the material in a meaningful way. He knew how to make it interesting.

Are you presenting to the company’s sales team or a group of programmers? The two groups tend to find different things interesting, so the lingo, metaphors, and examples you use will also need to be different.

Take some time to learn about your audience; frame your content so it’s interesting to them.

Lights, camera, you!

You may even want to take your listening one step further and record yourself practicing your presentation.

Listening to your recordings will bring to light things about yourself you had no idea existed. You’ll discover mannerisms you didn’t know you had, phrases you didn’t realize you used. It’s a humbling but valuable experience and something all the pros do.

At the end of the day, your goal is for your audience to understand and enjoy your presentation. If you want your audience to listen to you, begin by listening to yourself.

Do you really need those slides?

These days it seems the very act of giving a presentation comes with the expectation that at least a few PowerPoint slides will be involved. If you’ve ever tried telling your boss you don’t want to use slides in a presentation, chances are the response you got was a shocked, gasping, “why not?”

Well, because slides aren’t always necessary, that’s why. In fact, sometimes a presentation is better without them. It just depends on the content and context.

Too often people forget the purpose of slides. They are a useful tool to support your message, not take its place. When they’re used well, good slides can take an ordinary presentation from good to great, but it’s important to remember they are never as important as having a good story to tell in the first place.

I was reminded of this when I came across a talk recently given by Michael Pollan in the Authors@Google series. Michael is the author of five books, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, both New York Times bestsellers. He also happens to be an expert storyteller.

Even without a single visual, Michael’s presentation is vivid and engaging. He skillfully uses words and stories instead of slides to paint the pictures of his narrative. He even includes several statistics throughout his speech, not skipping a single beat as he recalls them from memory (an indicator of good preparation).

Michael’s presentation is a reminder that while slides can add a lot, having an interesting story to tell is what ultimately makes or breaks your presentation.

With no slides distracting our attention, we listen more closely to his words. It’s almost as though he’s telling us a few stories from across a dinner table, which is a style that works exceptionally well for his context and content.

Check out his Authors@Google presentation below, as well as his 2007 TED talk.

If you’re not familiar with Michael Pollan’s work, you’re in for a treat. I can guarantee you’ll find his perspectives on food and nature fascinating, potentially even life changing. Enjoy!

I’m sure you’ve heard it a thousand times, but it always helps to hear it again. Public speaking is all about preparation. It’s great to know how to think on your feet, but there’s no question the best presentations are the result of lots of practice.

So what’s the best way to prepare? Well, it depends. The chart above depicts the quality spectrum of speeches with varying styles of preparation.

At the boring end of the spectrum (the end you want to avoid) are the 10% of speeches that are prewritten word-for-word and read out loud from behind a podium. Think most graduation speeches. The people delivering these speeches don’t bother rehearsing the delivery since they assume there’s no need to—it’s all written out. But if you can think back to your high school days, you’ll recall that reading out loud to a room full of people is a lot harder than it seems. The rigid, stuttering delivery falls flat on the snoozing audience.

In the middle of the spectrum are the speeches delivered from an outline. For almost all of the presentations you will give, this is the best way to prepare. Speaking from an outline forces you to use conversational, natural language in your delivery, which makes the speech much more appealing to the audience.

The quality of your delivery will depend entirely on the amount of time you spend practicing. I don’t mean thinking about practicing while sitting at your computer writing your outline. I mean actually standing up in a room, facing a mirror or wall or lineup stuffed animals, whatever, and delivering the speech start to finish. The more times you can talk through your speech entirely, the more confident you’ll feel when the time comes to deliver it for real. Confidence is success.

Then, at the highest end of the spectrum are the greatest of great speeches. Like the worst speeches, these too are written out word-for-word beforehand, but unlike the worst speeches they are rehearsed so many times they practically become memorized. The process of delivering a speech like this has more in common with acting a scene than it does with reading words from a page or prompter. Think Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.

Writing a speech out in advance gives you the ability to choose every word, to predesign every metaphor for the strongest impact. It requires an enormous amount of preparation, weeks worth of it, so save this method for the speeches that really matter.

Being the opening act isn’t easy. The opening presenter at an event has two responsibilities:

1) Warm up the audience, and

2) Get through the logistical stuff that needs to be said before the person everyone is there to see takes the stage.

It can feel pretty grunt-level at times, but your role as an opening presenter is important and ought to be approached with the same passion you’d have if you were delivering the keynote address.

If there is one thing that is universal about presentations, it’s that a presentation without passion is a presentation without meaning. That’s why I am too often disappointed when I hear an opening presenter say something like this:

“Ok, so we’re about to get started! But first, I need to run through a list of thank you’s. It will only take a second.”

Run through a list of thank you’s? Tell me, what is the point of a thank-you when you run straight through it?

A thank you is meant to be something gracious. As much as people enjoy hearing their name read out loud, I don’t think hearing it quickly read from a list is going to give anyone the warm fuzzies inside.

A “running thank you” has no meaning and might as well be left out of your presentation.

The next time you’re an opening presenter and have people to thank on stage, take the time beforehand to understand why you are thanking each person. Slow your delivery down a notch and mean what you say. The audience will notice the difference, and I promise it will make your presentation better.

There is an old saying that says, “the reason we can see so far is because we stand upon the shoulders of giants.”

In other words, we owe so much of our knowledge and ideas to the countless teachers and gurus we learn from over the course of our lives.

It’d be impossible to write a blog about presentations without acknowledging one of the leading presentation experts in the world today, Garr Reynolds. If you are interested in presentation design theory and haven’t heard of Presentation Zen, it’s time you do.

Garr started writing the Presentation Zen blog back in 2005 as a way to regularly communicate his thoughts about presentations and design to the world. Today, it is one of the most popular and influential presentation resources out there.

Living in Osaka, Japan, Garr has an insightful take on presentation design and delivery that is strongly influenced by Japanese culture and the principles of zen philosophy. A few of my favorite Presentation Zen blog entries are: Gates, Jobs, and the Zen Aesthetic, Who says we need our logo on every slide?, Bill Gates and Visual Complexity, and Yoda vs Darth Vader.

Garr spent the past year consolidating several of the best ideas from his blog into the Presentation Zen book (available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble). Bearing no resemblance to your typical how-to manual for PowerPoint software, the Presentation Zen book is a much deeper exploration into the theory behind presentation design and delivery. As Garr describes it, it is “an approach”.

Garr really went the extra mile designing the book’s layout, so it as enjoyable to look at as it is to read. If you’re someone who ever gives presentations, you should definitely pick this one up.

These days the Presentation Zen blog is still going strong, with insightful new content being posted regularly. Check it out, I know you won’t be disappointed.

Below you can see a talk Garr recently gave at Google’s California headquarters. I think it’s an excellent presentation that gives a thorough overview of the Presentation Zen approach.

As you watch, pay particular attention to the way Garr keeps his audience involved throughout the entire presentation and utilizes his slides as backdrops to his conversational storytelling. Enjoy!

I recently attended a presentation that made me think back to a basic piece of marketing theory.

The purpose of the presentation was simple, it was to sell a product to an audience of prospects. Overall the delivery was good, but I was troubled by the way the presenter chose to differentiate her company’s product.

Instead of highlighting the benefits her company’s product offers, she spent the majority of her time criticizing each of her competitors and elaborating on the weaknesses of their products. This left a sour taste in my mouth and no doubt affected the impact her presentation had on the rest of the audience.

Only insecure companies need to spend so much time criticizing the competition, and they’re typically insecure for a reason.

If you can’t sell your product by highlighting the benefits it offers, chances are you don’t have a very good product. The same is true for the services you offer. The same is true for your company. The same is true for your life.

Be who you are, not who others aren’t.

Greek to Me

Aristotle and his ancient Greek buddies believed the key to good rhetoric was the combination of three things:

1) Ethos - Character appeal

2) Logos - Logical appeal

3) Pathos - Emotional appeal

Credibility. Logic. Emotion. I like to personify these three as the “Spirits of Speech”. Think of them as good friends who like to hang out. If you happened to meet one at a party he wouldn’t be very interesting by himself, but get all three together and they become a dynamic trio that can convince you of anything.

Aristotle was on to something when he first discovered the Spirits back in 300 BCE. It was a major insight into how our brains take in new information and learn; so major we still use it to craft our rhetoric today.

“Rhetoric” in this context is just an academic way of saying persuasion, which is the point of almost every presentation. People give presentations to sell things: ideas, products, services, themselves. You can also think of rhetoric as storytelling.

Spirit Ratio

It’s not hard to see why a speech is better when it has the right ratio of credibility, logic, and emotion.

When we prepare for speeches the old fashioned way (without slides) we tend to get it right. We intuitively think about the three Spirits and make sure our words strike the right balance between them.

However, the moment a slideshow gets involved people seem to lose their balance. Big time. Almost all of the content people put on their slides comes from Ethos and Logos. Pathos never gets invited to the party.

Think back to the last presentation you saw. The first few slides might have listed the speaker’s credentials in an unconvincing attempt to establish credibility with bullet points. The rest of the slides probably listed facts, and charts, and diagrams that were all intended to impress you with logic. The emotional appeal just wasn’t there, yet this is how a lot of people think slides “should” look.

Since bullet points all too often double as talking points, the speech portion of the presentation also suffers. The result is a credentialed and logical person talking about something no one gives a damn about. The result is a boring presentation.

Finding Your Pathos

So how do you get emotion into your presentation slides? It’s simpler than you think.

Pictures.

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand bullet points. Images have the power to abstract the emotional appeal of your message and evoke feelings in your audience. A picture can tell an elaborate story in an instant. Plus, pictures make your slides much more appealing to look at.

Some of the best presentations I’ve seen used no words on the slides at all, just pictures. While the speakers covered the Ethos and Logos with their words, their slides served as evocative backdrops, setting the mood (the Pathos) for the speech. It reminds me of the way set design and theatrical lighting set the mood for a stage actor’s scene.

Now don’t go reaching for your Clip Art library. The quality of images matters and Office Clip Art doesn’t cut it.

Photos you’ve taken with your own camera are the best choice, since they likely have a story to go along with them. If those don’t work for the particular presentation you’re working on then stock photography is the way to go. I’ll write more about stock photos and where to get them in a future entry.

Ethos. Logos. Pathos. A presenter’s three best friends. Keep each of them in mind for your next presentation and I promise you’ll be pleased with the results.

“Imagine your audience is naked.”

Advice often hastily tossed to a nervous person struggling to deliver a speech. I don’t know, maybe it works for some people, but if your imagination is too vivid this kind of advice can only lead to trouble.

Instead, imagine YOU are naked. I don’t mean without your clothes on, I mean without the projector on. Imagine presenting without your slides. Could you do it?

It’s the stuff of nightmares. You’re standing before a crowded room about to give a presentation when suddenly the screen goes black, your slides completely unavailable. For many this means fumbling with the podium’s computer controls, maybe putting in a frantic call to the IT guys, and ultimately delaying or canceling the presentation. But why does this make sense? Did the people in that audience come to read your slides off a big screen, or did they come to hear you speak?

Scary as it may be, learn to detach yourself from your slides. They are not the presentation. You are.

All too often PowerPoint is used as a crutch. The bullet points become the speaker’s talking points, and you can tell because she stares at the screen as she clicks through her slides. But look at this kind of presentation from the audience’s point of view. How do you like spending your time watching someone recite a series of lists?

Let’s be realistic, giving a speech is a little scary. For some, a lot scary. But the best way to deal with the stage-fright isn’t to fall back on a slideshow to tell your story, it’s to practice, practice, and practice again. Step away from the computer, away from your slides, and practice giving the presentation until you can deliver it comfortably without them. Practice until you can do it naked.

Then, when you have it down, bring the slides back in. You may find yourself wanting to rework some of your slides to better do their job–that is, to support what you say rather than just repeat it in list format. If you practice until you can do it naked, when the time comes to deliver your presentation to a real audience you’ll find the job is much less scary. You’ll find yourself feeling confident.

The stage-fright won’t ever go away completely. It’s an emotion even the most experienced presenters have to face every time they take the stage. But the confidence that comes with good practice will no doubt make a difference. So in the event the projector unexpectedly goes black just after you speak the first word of your next presentation, you won’t be left helpless, scrambling with the technology. Instead, you’ll remain calm, cool, collected, and just do it naked.

First Rule: There aren’t any rules for how a presentation should be made.

Second Rule: There aren’t any rules for how a presentation should look.

Third Rule: Anyone who tries to tell you there are rules for presentations is just making them up.

Just because something is done a certain way, does that mean it should be done that way? A standard has developed for how an electronic presentation (a PowerPoint) should look. You can see it in the way people make their slides. There should be a title slide at the beginning. Your name should be on it. There should be bullet points, and there should be lots of them. There should be slide numbers in the lower corner next to the company logo. Shouldn’t there be?

The “shoulds” that we live with in the presentation world are a byproduct of the templates our presentation applications encourage us to use. The “quick start wizards” and “setup assistants” were the ones that first taught us what bullet points were and where we should put them on our slides. They taught us about templates, and made us want to use them. But what is a template except a collection of ways our slides “should” look?

Businesses particularly like the template approach because it’s so orderly and seemingly professional. Many businesses today pay graphic designers to make a corporate template for their organization. Usually it’s even accompanied by a “guidelines” document that details instructions for how the template should and should not be used. If you work for one of these organizations and are delivering a presentation, there is a good chance you don’t have a choice but to use the corporate template.

Yet even with these professionally designed templates the presentations we encounter on a daily basis still somehow fall flat. Audiences of stakeholders and other employees doze off as one bulleted list dissolves into the next. Very little meaning gets across.

I understand why the templates are here, and they aren’t entirely bad. Companies spend a lot of money on branding, and they see corporate presentation templates as an extension of that. Plus, a lot of people naively think they aren’t creative enough to “design” something, and so the templates act as safety blankets that ensure our slides will at least look mediocre. But since when is mediocre something to strive for?

The fact of the matter is better presentations don’t come from better templates. For presentations that involve speaking to a room full of people, a template full of “shoulds” is the wrong place to start. Think about your presentation itself first, the interaction in the space between you and your audience, not which slide theme to choose.

Giving a speech is a creative act, there’s no doubt about it. As a speaker you are setting out to tell people about something, to teach something, to sell something. Your job is to figure out the best way to relate it.

Break the rules. You’ll be pleasantly surprised what will happen when you approach your slides as a place to enhance your message, and not as a set of boundaries to limit it.