Have you ever suffered from “Death by Powerpoint” ? Too much information, little interaction, presenters reading bullet-points of slides with little enthusiasm … does this sound familar ? Garr Reynolds, creator of the most popular Web site on presentation design and delivery — presentationzen.com — shares his experience at a Google-Meeting in a provocative mix of inspiration and guidance that will change the way you think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote. Watching this will take around 70 minutes of your time, but believe me its more engaging than most 15 minute presentations I have ever seen.
Lets work together to reduce the number of “template-based and bullet-point-driven” group-reading meetings. We may even free up some time along the way to get serious work done.
I guess you may by now that I am bit of a “presentation freak”. Every time you are doing a presentation, you have an objective. Right ? Well, I hope so, why else would you do the presentation in the first place ? Therefore, it is very important to put a lot of thought into the visuals and the words that come with it. Just watch this great example: Stephen Colbert explains on Comedy Central the rebranding of Cingular to AT&T!
The same could have been presented with tons of slides and bullet points. So, do you think this would have the same effect ?
I think this movie is great. There are actually two things I really like about it:
it says a lot about our world and makes you think
it is a good example for creating a great presentation
The slides show how to put “cold” statistical data into into an emotional context. Showing the presented data in standard powerpoint fashion (=templates and bullet points) would certainly not get the message accross the same way. I think we can all learn a great bit from this and keep it in mind for the next time we are preparing a presentation. Watch this movie below. (3min 25sec)
More information about the “Miniature Earth” project can be found here.