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August 8th, 2008

The world’s best presentations. Really?

The ever-excellent Slideshare is run­ning its annual World’s Best Pre­sen­ta­tion con­test. Brows­ing through, there are some really nice decks with inter­est­ing con­tent. You can eas­ily see the influ­ence Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen and Duarte Design have had (all for the bet­ter) in the war against death by Pow­er­Point. I par­tic­u­larly like the following:

But…

The thing that strikes me look­ing through most of the entries is that the pre­sen­ter is almost entirely super­flu­ous. Surely pre­sen­ta­tions, at their best, are about pre­sen­ters mak­ing a con­nec­tion with an audi­ence – not sim­ply a set of slides that can be read through (how­ever pretty they are).

So while the com­pe­ti­tion may show­case some of the world’s best slide decks, for the best pre­sen­ta­tions you’ll still have to look to TED.

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  • http://www.slideology.com Nancy Duarte

    I couldn’t agree more. A pre­sen­ta­tion should have a pre­sen­ter. This “pre­sen­ta­tion” is actu­ally a lovely on-line brochure. It’s pow­er­ful in its own right but a real pre­sen­ta­tion (espe­cially a world-class one) pro­vides an oppor­tu­nity for humans to con­nect in person.

  • http://www.peterbotting.com Peter Bot­ting

    Fol­low­ing on from Nancy’s com­ment. Peo­ple as pre­sen­ters must con­nect with an audi­ence of peo­ple — visual aids should be just that — visual aids that demon­strate, under­score or empha­sise what the pre­sen­ter is saying.

    The prob­lem with Pow­er­point has been an over-reliance by the vast major­ity of users on the (often basic use of) tech­nol­ogy. Funkier tech­nol­ogy and providers such as Duarte or Keynote are great and often breath-taking and a refresh­ing change — but still need to be tools of the pre­sen­ter not their surrogates.

  • http://b1blog.wordpress.com/ Jay Ball

    I com­pletely agree. Slide­ware, sadly, is too often a crutch. This is because, for many, pre­sent­ing is just plain scary and any­thing that focuses atten­tion away from them is a good thing as far as they are concerned.

    Of course, the para­dox is that the pre­sen­ta­tion should, as Nancy says, be a vehi­cle for a human connection.

    One of the things that struck me in Nancy’s book (which is utterly bril­liant by the way) is the sug­ges­tion to use the W/B keys to go to plain white/black dur­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion. This is a dra­matic way to focus atten­tion on the pre­sen­ter. And for many would be com­pletely ter­ri­fy­ing. But done well cre­ates such a pos­i­tive difference.

    Thank you both for your comments.