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.

Picture Power

It’s no secret beautiful pictures can improve the impact of your slides, but a lot of people don’t know where to find them.

Clip Art looks like it still belongs in the early-1990s, and Google’s Image Search rarely yields the high quality images we’re looking for. Not to mention, there are legal issues with reusing copyrighted images found in the random tubes of the internet.

If you’ve never heard the term, “Stock Photography” refers to photos that are not taken for a specific client, but instead are made available for use by any client for any purpose. “Royalty Free”, a phrase you’ll often hear around stock photos, just means the image can be used an unlimited amount of times in certain media without paying royalties to the photographer.

Historically, stock photo catalogs were only available to professional media and design firms. The images were priced out of reach of ordinary people.

Fortunately, the internet has leveled this playing field and in the past few years several stock photo resources have sprouted up aimed at both professionals and consumers alike.

Where to get ‘em?

By popular request, I’d like to share with you some of my favorite places to get good quality stock photos. (Note: When I use the word “quality” in this context, I’m referring to both the resolution and the overall attractiveness of the images.)

stock.xchng - (Free - Mixed Quality) When budget is an issue but you want good quality images, this is the place to go. Stock.xchng is, by far, the best free stock photo resource I know of. Their image tagging could be better, but on the whole their search tool works very well. Not all the images in their library are spectacular, but there are enough gems mixed in to make searching around worthwhile. There is also a for-pay sister version of the site (stock.xpert), which boasts higher quality photos (as well as illustrations) for very reasonable prices (about $1-$10 per image).

iStockphoto - (Inexpensive - High Quality) Out of all the stock photo resources on the web, this one is my favorite. iStockphoto has a gigantic library of photos to choose from (their library also includes illustrations and videos). The site enforces strict guidelines for the quality of images that can be submitted, so most of images come from professional photographers and designers. The entire library is very well tagged, so when you perform a search you almost always get the results you want on the first try. While the images aren’t free, they are very reasonably priced (about $1-$10 per picture). It’s a small price to pay for the impact and professionalism such high quality images will add to your presentation. Definitely check this one out.

Getty Images - (Expensive, Best Quality) Getty is the top dog when it comes to stock photography. It may be expensive, but when you have the budget or just need that one perfect picture, there’s no better place to go. Getty is the image resource for countless top-notch media and design firms around the world.

Of course, there are many more stock photo resources out there. These are just a few of my favorites that you may also find useful when making your next presentation. If you have a favorite photo resource I did not mention, go ahead and leave a note about it in the comments.

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.

Let’s shift gears now and talk about design. Well-designed slides alone don’t make a presentation great, but they certainly don’t hurt either.

Little Designers

Design is a tricky topic to address because people tend to see design as a profession, something only “designers” do. In the same way that too many people think they can’t be creative, too many people think they can’t design things.

When we’re little kids we spend hours and hours painting pictures. We are born as little designers. We draw the things we see, the things we think about. We don’t worry about critics or cynics. We don’t care what others might think if we express ourselves, if we show our feelings. As little kids the world is full of new things. We notice a lot of little nuances, so many we can’t help but express the world we see. Yet somehow this creative drive gets sucked out of us as we grow up. We get used to the things in the world and start to feel self-conscious about expressing ourselves. We forget we were once little designers. We forget what we can do.

The first step to good design is good observation.

Slowing down just a little bit, paying attention to the world and noticing the nuances that make things interesting is the best design education you can get. Design is all over the place.

A Photography Lesson

There’s a great design tip photographers use that slide designers can learn from. It’s called the “Rule of Thirds.” (I’m normally not a big fan of “rules” in this context, so ignore what it’s called and think of it as a principle. “Rules” are hard boundaries of what you should and shouldn’t do. “Principles” are sails that guide you in the direction you’d like to go.)

You can set two photos of the same object side by side and see two very different images. Next time you see a photo you like, pause a moment and ask yourself why you like it.

The “Rule of Thirds” has to do with framing your shot, which is to say it has to do with where you line up the things in your photo.

Imagine drawing two vertical and two horizontal lines across your image, dividing it into thirds each way (like a grid with nine boxes). The idea is to line up the important elements of your photo (the horizon, the person’s eyes, etc) with these lines and their intersections, instead of lining them up with the exact center of the image as we’re inclined to do.

It isn’t exactly clear why (it has to do with the Golden Ratio), but images lined up on the thirds tend to look much more natural and appealing. Something about them is more interesting.

Applying it to Slide Design

Once you know about the Rule of Thirds you’ll see it being used all over the place. Magazines and other print media regularly use it for their layouts. Cinematographers line up movie scenes along the thirds all the time. Television directors do the same thing (notice where the news anchor sits and where the graphic lines up in the upper corner).

The Rule of Thirds can make your PowerPoint slides look a lot better too. Our first impulse is usually to place objects on the horizontal and vertical centers of our slide. Instead, next time you’re making a presentation try aligning your text boxes and images on the thirds. It will often lead to a less typical and more interesting looking slide that’s more appealing to an audience.

Using grid lines of any kind in your slide design also adds a consistency to your slides that makes the whole presentation look more polished and professional.

The Rule of Thirds is one of those great design tips that comes from nature, so it can be picked up intuitively. It resonates well with human perception and can make your slides look a lot more appealing. It’s a design tip that’s simple to implement and yields big results, so give it a try in your next presentation.

“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.

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!