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I recently had the chance to take part in an all-day brain­storm at the top of 30 St Mary Axe (also know as the Gherkin).

Some­how, a cam­era fell into my bag on my way out of the house and, as I was there, it seemed rude not to take some shots.

You can see a selec­tion of the pho­tos here.

How many times have you sat down to a present­a­tion only to be faced with War & Peace on each slide? Bul­let fol­low­ing bul­let only sep­ar­ated by some sub-bullets and a graph in a font so small that it looks like braille?

Then there’s that moment just before the presenter switches to full screen mode when you notice that this is slide one of 128. And you think to your­self: this is time I am never, ever going to get back.

Life­hacker points to a deck by Alexei Kapterev high­light­ing where so many presenters go wrong:

[slide­share id=85551&doc=death-by-powerpoint4344&w=425]

While the points are not par­tic­u­larly new, to my mind they can­not be made often enough.

Bey­ond this, the next port of call for the repent­ant Power­Pointer has to be Present­a­tion Zen. From there to TED and Pecha Kucha (see here for examples). And on to Amazon to order Jon Steel’s excel­lent Per­fect Pitch and Guy Kawaski’s The Art of the Start.

Guy’s 10÷20÷30 rule has to be the one we should all aspire to: 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point type – and then a really good con­ver­sa­tion. While I’m not there yet myself, if you see me doing the kinds of present­a­tions in Kapterev’s deck, do me a favour – stop me and slap me. Thank you.

Take a look at this.

The stills don’t do it justice, but it comes from the chro­no­text site that “is a grow­ing col­lec­tion of soft­ware exper­i­ments explor­ing the rela­tion between text, space and time.”

Essen­tially it runs a selec­tion of text around a spiral that’s laid on top of a topo­graph­ical map. And it’s awfully pretty. down­load the Java app and see it in action.

Nice.

Source: NOTCOT