Presentation slides - still lots of work to be done
Saturday, April 2, 2011 at 8:22AM I know this is a bit off-topic for this blog, but I'll mention it anyway. I spent yesterday at Brighton SEO (an excellent free event organised by Kelvin Newman at Site Visibility). The opening panel got the day off to a good start with a spirited discussion about the future of SEO and the value it really brings to the marketing mix. Andy Budd and Jamie Freeman bravely argued the case against SEO as a legitimate marketing activity in front of a couple of hundred SEO practitioners,
Anyway, the point of this post is not about the pros and cons of SEO but about the quality of the presentations yesterday; the slides not necessarily the speakers. I know rants and moans about "PowerPoint hell" and "death by PowerPoint" have been going on as long as that software has been around but I'm still amazed that in 2011 people are still standing up in front of audiences with slides containing:
- long lists of bullet points;
- hundreds of words;
- small fonts that can be hard to read;
- slide builds that go on forever;
- background pictures that camouflage the text;
- diagrams that look as though they were designed by a 6 year old.
We've been using PowerPoint and the like for over 20 years so why are people still boring, confusing, annoying their audiences? Several of the presentations yesterday committed, between them, all of the above basic errors. What makes it worse is that these are people operating in commercial environments who presumably are pitching to clients/prospects on a regular basis. I'm not criticising the quality of what the speakers were saying - this was generally excellent - just the style and contruction of their slides.
So how should it be done? I'm certainly not a beacon of excellence but I am trying to avoid the basic pitfalls listed above. Harry Brignull's presentation was the best I saw yesterday; low on text, good use of powerful images, humour. His design/UX background is obviously an advantage but there is no reason why the less creative amongst us can't learn something from the slides below (the presentation below is from UX Brighton 2010 but the slides he used yesterday were a subset of these).
