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.

In the beginning there were words. Human beings have always given presentations to one another, we just used to call it storytelling. We told stories to teach each other things, to entertain. Some think storytelling may have even contributed to our species’ evolutionary edge. It turns out it’s useful to be able to learn from the experiences of others.

Then came the visuals. Spoken words are only sounds, so visuals added a new dimension to our stories. We used props and acted out scenes to enhance our meaning and empower our stories with more emotion. Fast forward to the era of electricity and the visuals took the form of slides. A 35mm projector shined photographs on a large white screen while we told our stories, only at this point we had stopped calling them stories. We decided the act of “giving a presentation” was something different, something professional and serious. Something that had rules. Stories were demoted to the realm of entertainment and children’s play.

Over the past two decades, electronic slideshow software like Microsoft PowerPoint has replaced the 35mm projector and, with that, presentations have crept their way deep into our lives. For a lot of us, a day does not go by that doesn’t involve reading, watching, or making a presentation. It is a standard tool in business, used for internal and external company communications. In the education world students use electronic slides to accompany their group projects and oral presentations. It’s show and tell, now with bullet points.

Presentations have become a standard part of life, and with that a standard has developed for how presentations should look. Sadly, it’s a standard that is set low–very low. Anyone who has sat through a typical presentation knows what I’m referring to. The repetitive lists of bullet points. The bad templates garnished with equally bad animations and irrelevant “clip art”. Simply put, the standard electronic presentations of today are boring and ugly.

That’s harsh, I know. But it’s true. It is the state of presentations.

As presenters we welcome the standard. Public speaking is hard, in fact it’s downright scary for some people. Having a standard makes the whole process a lot easier. So long as our slides are in the corporate template everything in the presentation will be okay, right?

As audience members we dread the standard. We don’t like being forced to waste precious hours of our lives listening to someone read single serving lists of text from a screen in a dark room. We can only distract ourselves with our Blackberries for so long while we pretend to listen.

So, easy to make or painful to watch? Which perspective should we keep in mind when crafting our presentations?

Fortunately, the state of presentations is changing. The volume of literature relating to presentation theory is growing every day, and more and more people are realizing the standard is optional.

Presentations are about storytelling, they always have been and they still are. Remember that and you’ve taken a very big step in the right direction.

Did you know it is estimated over 120,000 new blogs start worldwide every single day? That’s a new blog faster than every second! If you’re a relatively wired individual there’s a good chance you regularly read several. Allow me to welcome you to this one.

When you step back and think about it, blogs are a big deal. Bloggers could almost be considered the sages and gurus of our time. They deliver their knowledge and insight into just about every genre of ideas society can think up, and their words resonate far. Their audience is made up of anyone on the planet with an interest and an internet connection. Just think about the impact a person with a computer and some ideas can have in today’s world.

Sure, there are the seemingly pointless blogs out there too (daily insights to zombie defense, anyone?), but I don’t put a lot of faith in concepts like “pointless”. While they may not be interesting to you, they are probably interesting to someone. A great teacher of mine had a saying for this. “It’s not boring, you are.” I’ll save delving into that one for another time.

I know I’ve learned a lot from many great bloggers. I see writing this as a continuation of that learning experience. As a presentation consultant, I spend a lot of time helping people tell their stories better. I plan to use this blog as a forum to develop and discuss some of my ideas relating to presentation, visual design, and human perception.

As we set out I am reminded of a line from the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 

“You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it.” 

Becoming a great presenter is as much (if not more) an endeavor in personal development as it is in creating better presentations.

Presentation is everywhere and relates to everything. The ability to communicate your ideas effectively is becoming an increasingly crucial skill in the business world, and life in general. I hope this blog gets you thinking more deeply about your life as a story-teller.

With that, I hope you enjoy!

Please feel free to engage in the discussion by leaving a few comments. Check back for the next entry soon. Happy reading!