New Blog
by Project Presentation on Aug.05, 2011, under Project Presentation
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8 Presentation rules you should break
by Project Presentation on Jun.22, 2011, under Crafting, Project Presentation
Over time I’ve been asking people I meet if there are any presentation rules they follow. I’ve heard a few that made some sense, and others which are just preposterous. There are two types of rules, I’ve identified, which come from different approaches to presentations: the first style appeared shortly after powerpoint gave the masses the ability to create slideshows; the second type is emerging now, as more and more people advocate for visual presentations. Here’s a collection of rules I think everyone should break.
Rules from early powerpoint days you should break:
1- The 6-6-1 rule: This rule was intended to limit the amount of information showed on each slide, it promotes 6 sentences in each slide, 6 words per sentence and 1 idea per slide. The thing is that this rule probably started the whole idea of filling every slide with bullet points, instead of having simpler slides… BREAK IT! Try using one word or sentence per slide.
2- Tell them what you’re going to tell them; then tell them; then tell them what you told them: This is a very sales oriented rule, and it actually sounds good when you hear it. But people don’t need you to repeat the same thing over and over. In your allotted time you’re going to be able to put forward 3 main points, if you’re lucky. You don’t have the time or need to repeat yourself – BREAK IT! Only repeat what you said at the end, in a short summary.
3- Have a thank you slide: I guess this one came up when people started realizing they were boring their audiences to death and had to thank them for putting up with them – BREAK IT! Have a summary slide at the end with the three main points, this will be the slide they see the longest.
4- Start with a joke: I really don’t know who originated this rule or why – BREAK IT! Start with something that shows your personality or sets the mood for the session. Funny remarks are ok, jokes are just lame.
5- Put your logo on every slide: Repeating the same element on every slide just makes the audience tune it out and not pay attention – BREAK IT! Put your logo on the first and last slide.
Rules from the new, visual, presentation style:
1- Have pictures on slides, even if they are irrelevant: You’d be surprised how many people have heard this one! Pictures are useful to expand on what you’re saying, they help you explain complex concepts; but pictures just for the sake of pictures will only confuse the audience – BREAK IT! Use pictures only when they are relevant.
2- Use images as your background: Some images, because of the contrast, will make your text difficult to read – BREAK IT! If you’re going to combine text and images make sure the text can be read easily on the image or don’t use it as the background for the slide.
3- 10-20-30 rule: This rule was created by Guy Kawasaki. He has to sit through an obscene number of presentations and it’s understandable why he would love all presentations to follow this rule. The idea is to use 10 slides, in 20 minutes and with font no smaller than 30pt. In reality if you try to follow this rule you will find yourself leaving out relevant info or packing a lot of really big text on your slides – BREAK IT, BUT KEEP IN MIND THE PRINCIPLE BEHIND IT! When making your presentation try to use fewer slides, less text (readable to the whole room) and don’t go over 20 to 30 minutes.
Any other presentation rules people should break that you can think of? Leave them in the comments.
Until next time,
Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.
Back to basics: Editing the Master Slide
by Project Presentation on Jun.10, 2011, under Back to Basics
Have you ever wondered how people make their own templates in powerpoint so that all their presentations look consistent? Or have you ever just lost it because your boss told you to add your company logo on every slide? Well, that’s where the slide master comes in.
The slide master view is an option in powerpoint that will allow you to make changes to the way your slides will look and apply it to all slides of that type. First thing we have to do is go to View in the menu bar, and then click Slide Master. Once in the Slide Master you can edit anything you want so that it stays consistent on each slide. No need to go adding something in to every slide last minute.
In this slide we added some arrows between the elements we are comparing and changed the style of the bullet points
The first thing you’ll notice is the left panel, which allows you to choose which type of slide you want to edit. You can choose a design for all your title slides or add an element to comparison slides, like this example.
First, let’s say we want to change the font we use throughout the whole presentation. Select the title and then click fonts and select the one you want to use. Now that font will be applied to all titles in your presentation and the default font each time you create a new slide. Instead of having to go change it slide by slide.
Now let’s say we want to add a different touch to my titles, let’s go to insert and image, and bring in a piece of paper. Send it to the background (by right clicking on it or using the arrange option) and maybe top it off with some sticky tape… And there you have it! Completely new and fresh looking titles for all your slides in about 2 minutes! When you finish save your changes with a name
and you can always go back to that template and use it in future presentations.
There are many options within the Slide Master, you can change the background, slide size, font, colors, footers… Just go in and experiment.
Until next time,
Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.
My only rule for better presentations
by Project Presentation on May.31, 2011, under Project Presentation
The interesting thing about presentations is that they are totally subjective, although there are some practices that we all dislike when we see a presentation (too much text, background and fonts with little contrast, too many bullet points…), there is no step by step guide on how to make a good presentation.
For those of you who get annoyed at the fact that there are no guides to perfect presentations and those who are curious about how I improved, and still work on improving, my own, here is my only rule: Try something new in each presentation.
The presentation creation process has nothing to do with business and everything to do with design. We all know there are rules for good design, and they should be followed in the creation of each slide and the presentation as a whole; however, there is no guide that can explain step by step how you make a good presentation, since each person’s presentation style and what works for them is different. To make good presentations you need experience to develop an eye for them, to develop a sense of what is a good and a bad presentation. Enter my rule, if you try one new thing in each presentation and watch to see your audience’s response, you can start to identify what things people like in your presentations.
Here is a list of things I included in my presentations and that you can start applying to yours, in no specific order, as I said, this is not a step by step guide:
- Substitute text for images
- Use a slide without text
- Draw attention to the most important word in a sentence by giving it a different color or size
- Use two different fonts for two different purposes
- Don’t use bullet points
- Don’t use slides
- Ask the audience a question
- Post your presentation on the internet before you start
- Give a handout with the most important parts of your presentation or extra information when you finish
- Draw on a whiteboard while you speak
- Don’t speak for the first minute of your presentation, just wait until you have everyone’s undivided attention
- Include a video in your presentation
- Record yourself presenting
- Include Charlie Sheen in your presentation somehow (no specific reason, it’s just fun to see how people work around to fit him in, you can always substitute Charlie Sheen for any other ridiculous person you can think of)
- Put tittles on the bottom of the slide, instead of the top
- Don’t use your company´s template
- Use QR codes to guide your audience to more info about the subject
Now I’m going to list a few things I haven’t tried yet, but which are on my list
- Tweet while I present (not personally, automated)
- Have a poll for the audience
- Do my presentation on-line
- Set a limit to my number of slides (present at Pecha Kucha)
- Present wearing a hat
- Use presentation styles more based on text, like Lessig or Takahashi
- Present in rhyme
These are just some quick ideas, I’m sure there are many I’m leaving out or that will come to me later on. The idea behind changing only one thing is to see what you feel more comfortable with and what your style is, without having to change everything in your presentation. If you realize there is some good advice there about things we’ve already talked about, and then there are others that are just for fun. Who said that presenting couldn’t be fun? Experiment and play with you presentation style!
If you try something new or you think about something I left out add it on the comment section.
Until next time,
Byron Stanford for Project Presentation
Presentation lesson from the film industry, or how to make people fall in love with your content
by Project Presentation on May.26, 2011, under Crafting
Presentations are nothing like movies. You can go to the movies and sit there for two hours giving your full, undivided attention. But have you ever been able to sit through a two hour presentation without wanting to rip your hair out? Usually not 10 minutes go by without people starting to tweet or answer emails.
by Thomas Milne
There are many lessons to be learned from the film industry on how we present the information in our presentations to make it more interesting to the audience; much of it has to do with storytelling. But probably the most important thing to realize is that, no matter how brilliantly you tell your story, or how good you are at creating anticipation and mystery around your content, a presentation can never hold a lot of information and remain interesting.
When we start preparing our presentation there is much research that has to be done. Whether it’s because your boss asked you to present the company’s new product or because you’re giving a talk about your industry at an event, you never want to look foolish in front of the audience. After all the research is done we have a huge problem selecting what pieces of information are the most relevant. This usually leads people to not want to choose what makes and doesn’t make the cut and pack all the info on to their slides.
I’ve talked about this before, these type of slides are not really slides, they are documents, what is known as a slideument. When you have a large collection of information, its place is a document, not a presentation. This document is like a movie, it holds all the information, and is something you can refer to during your presentation and hand out at the end, or even just send a link to an online version to be more environmentally conscious.
So if the document with all the research, findings, opinions and information is the movie, what is your presentation? Your presentation is the trailer for your content. Trailers are short, they choose the most interesting parts of movies and leave some questions unanswered, as a result, they make almost any movie seem interesting. If you choose the most relevant and interesting parts of the information you are going to present wisely, you can make almost any audience fall in love with your content.
Until next time,
Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.
Never pitch investors
by Project Presentation on Apr.20, 2011, under Delivery
Two weeks ago the Tetuan Valley Startup School, program I’m proud to be a mentor at, kicked off. On the first session Alex Barrera was explaining to the teams the ins and outs of being an entrepreneur and creating a startup. We actually came up with this definition for an entrepreneur:
photo Jump off by aJ GAZMEN ツ GucciBeaR
One of the things Alex told the teams shocked me: “Never pitch investors”. He actually explained the reason very well afterwards, and I have to say I totally agree.
Alex told us how entrepreneurs usually prepare their pitch, trying to give the investors all the information they need to instantly know if they are interested in investing, something like: “Hello, I’m John Doe, I just created a startup that wants to solve parking problems in major cities with a simple app you can have on your smartphone. We’re looking to raise $8,000 of investment to get everything finished.”
It is true that this is a direct and clear message, but nonetheless not a very effective way of raising money. Alex’s way of getting an investor interested in what you’re doing is much more in tune with the social aspect of today’s communications. The idea is that you see an investor at an event, probably during a coffee break and you go over and actually start a conversation with him, not just rant off what you do; the interaction would go something like this:
- John: Hi! So, what did you think of the last group that presented/the news about [insert trendy topic]/the coffee?
- Investor: Very interesting actually it made me think of…
- John: Yeah! I see your point, I thought… (don’t lie to impress, just give your honest opinion).
I’m John, by the way.
- Investor: Oh, I’m Mr. Angel.
- John: what do you do? (even if you know)
- Investor: I’m an early venture capitalist. What do you do?
- John: well, I just created a new startup that’s going to solve parking problems in major cities using cell phones. Did you have trouble parking when you got here?
- Investor: Actually, I did!
- John: see? If you were using our service you would have saved the extra 20 minutes looking for a parking spot!
- Investor: Interesting, why don’t you tell me more about the project?
- John: Sure, here’s my card, let’s set up a meeting.
That would be the ideal situation probably, but you get the point. The same concept as with the elevator pitch applies: it’s about getting the investor interested in what you’re doing. The only difference is instead of assaulting them whenever you get a minute of their time, you’re starting a conversation with them which is the best platform to build a relationship from.
Until next time,
Byron Stanford for Project Presentation
Changing the background for the whole Presentation
by Project Presentation on Apr.15, 2011, under Back to Basics
I just started the Back to Basics section because a lot of people often ask me how to do this type of things, and because knowing how to do them is necessary to follow a lot of what I talk about here in the blog. So here’s the first entry.
When you want to change your presentation’s background from PowerPoint’s default white color, you can do it in two different ways. Well, I’m sure there’s also other ways, but these are the two I use the most.
The first one is right-clicking on your slide and at the bottom of the drop down menu you have the option Format Background. When you select it, you see a window that will let you select what type of fill you want to give your slides. You can select a different color from white for your background; this is something I don’t usually recommend, unless it’s a soft tone, because it’s still one flat color. The next option is to fill it with a gradient, this is more attention-grabbing and something I usually use, if you play around with the options you can get some interesting looking backgrounds, like this:
The good thing about gradients is that they get rid of the boring flat background colors. There’s two more options, fill with a picture or texture and pattern fill; forget textures and patterns all together. When you want to use a picture as your background just navigate to the file (no clipart! I repeat, no clipart!). Finally chose if you want to use that picture or color as a background for one slide or the whole slideshow. You also have the option here to reset background and go back to the classic background.
When you use images as a background, be careful they have enough quality so they don’t look pixelated when blown up, and also try to use images that are not too busy and follow the rule of thirds.
The second method for changing your background is changing the Master Slide, but I’ll go over this in the next entry.
Until next time,
Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.
[Meme] The Presentation Alphabet
by Project Presentation on Mar.31, 2011, under Project Presentation
by kvanhorn
Started by Carles Caño at presentástico, we bring you our take on the Presentation Alphabet.
A
- Audience. The audience is probably the most important part of your presentation, you’re giving it to them and for them; you want to influence them somehow. Here’s how you make an Audience Needs Map .
B
- Bullet points. The most common element in presentations worldwide, sadly. Bullet Points are for listing things, not for all your content. Read F… Bullet Points .
C
- Clarity. Achieving it in your presentation might not be that easy. Your message has to be understood quickly and clearly. Read Concept Slides
D
- Design. Something many presenters fear, or worse. Design is a part of our lives, you live surrounded by it. Take inspiration from daily things around you and think as a designer when making your slides. Don’t type your slides, design them. Read Can Coco Chanel teach you how to make better slides?
E
- Emotion. It drives people, include emotion in your presentation to cause your audience to act on your material. Presentation lesson from the dark side .
F
- Feedback. After every presentation you should get feedback from your audience and peers to see how to improve the next time. Olivia Mitchell has great advice on using the backchannel to get feedback and other cool things –How to manage the Twitter backchannel.
G
- Graphs. They can be very powerful tools to prove your point or very confusing slides that will confuse and distract. Sowing data effectively .
H
- Handout. Slides are not the right type of document to present information, instead of putting all your information on them, put only the necessary to make your point; you can give detailed information on a suitable medium after the presentation as a handout. Read When not to make a presentation.
I
- Idea. 1 idea on each slide, no more. Nick Smith from Advance your slides made a great presentation Don’t be a powerpoint felon. Guess what tip number one is.
J
- Jokes. They have their place, and it isn’t in a presentation. Use humor, not jokes. How to use humor in your presentations .
K
- Knowledge. If they’ve asked you to give a presentation on a subject it’s because you have knowledge about it, so don’t feel intimidated by who might be in the audience and give a great presentation.
L
- Learn. Always learn from presentations you’ve given. We can all improve at everything we do. There’s a great post by John at Presentation Advisors with 100 tips to learn how to make better presentations!
M
- Multimedia. Images, audio, video… Multimedia can really empower your message and engage your audience. Here’s an article to learn to embed Youtube videos in powerpoint .
N
- Numbers. Many times we’re faced with having to present a lot of data. Raw numbers don’t mean much to people; people find meaning in relationships. When you have to show numbers concentrate on the relationship between the numbers and what it means. For a great example check out Hans Rosling’s presentation on world population trends.
O
- Order. The structure of your presentation is what makes it understandable. Information has to flow naturally from one point to the next. Read Nancy Duarte’s Music has a structure. Your presentation should too.
P
- Project Presentation, of course 
Find us on Twitter, Facebook or SlideShare.
Q
- Questions. We all know we’ll get questions at the end of the presentation. But do you know what two questions to ask yourself before? Read this great article by Garr Reynolds.
R
- Rehearse. Rehearsal is the only way to perfection. Have you seen those presentations where the speaker seems so natural and to be improvising the whole thing? Those have the longest preparation! Read How to rehearse a presentation.
S
- Story. Use a story in your presentation to keep guide and keep your audience involved. Are your presentations memorable?
T
- Teasing. Tease before you tell. Create expectation from the audience; make them want to hear the rest. Look at how Dan Pink opens one of his presentations at TED
U
- Unlearn. We’ve all learned to use powerpoint in the way its basic template work (title on top and content on bullet points). One of the first lessons I learned from Garr Reynolds was to unlearn all of this and think of slides in a different way; curiously enough we’ve all heard this before from Yoda. Present like Yoda you can.
V
- Visuals. Slides are referred to as visual aids, not as presentation, not as speaker notes. If you’re using slides they should aid you in conveying your message, don’t type your whole presentation on them.
W
- Whitespace. Whitespace is the oxygen for the eye; it lets the eye “breathe” and focus on what’s important.
X
- Xperience (okay, I cheated). Including your personal experiences in your talk will give your presentation credibility and power. Read The magical ingredient by Phil Presents and watch the amazing talk by Scott Stratten in it.
Y
- You. You are the presentation, not your slides. Put yourself out there and don’t hide behind your slides.
Z
- Zen. Presentation Zen is a great website by my mentor, Garr Reynolds. He’s written plenty of material and books combining the elements of Zen and presentations, all very recommend if you want to learn how to create and give great presentations.
I hope you enjoyed the post, if you can come up with other words and links that have to do with presentations, leave it in the comments. Or create your own Presentation Alphabet and link to it!
Until next time,
Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.
First kinetic typography video
by Project Presentation on Mar.16, 2011, under Project Presentation
For those of you keeping track, you’ve probably noticed I haven’t posted or been around for a while. This is due to my latest project: I was approached by a group of students from the university I graduated from asking me to help 
them with a competition for an NGO. The group was to create a presentation that explained a solution to the world water crisis. Winning the competition meant getting the project funded by Water.org. I liked the idea and got on board.
Much to my surprise the project needed much more than a presentation, a video had to be submitted explaining who the group was and the idea we came up with. So, not having much time I barricaded myself to get this video done. Now you can enjoy it, check out the solution we came up with and even vote for our solution! The solution is actually a really good approach to solving the world water crisis; you see, 1 out 4 people die of a water related desease a year; that is a quarter of the world’s population. A huge problem. Water.org has already helped 1,000,000; with this solution we want to reach more that 100,000,000 people in the next 5 years. Help us make a difference.
Until next time,
Byron Stanford for Project Presentation
Give your presentations context (a long time ago…)
by Project Presentation on Feb.28, 2011, under Crafting, Delivery
This is the last post I’ll write drawing presentation advice from Star Wars, mainly because I can’t get any other ideas. But I think that 5 posts are nothing to be shy about!
I think the movie industry, in general, and the internet have spoiled us. We watch a lot of movies where the beginning is really the end, you have flashbacks in the middle… on the internet everything jumps from one link to another without any sort of order; and this all affects us. I can still remember my teachers at university telling me how the generation that grew up with internet has a lot of problems when it comes to structuring our ideas. We have difficulty with the basic structure of introduction, development and resolution. I don’t really know why, but it has something to do with hyperlinks and movies that start with the ending, that’s for sure.
So, going back to Star Wars, in presentations we do start from the beginning. Logical, right? What does this mean? Just like Lucas put gave us the context with “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” We have to give our audience the context for our presentation. Don’t start your presentation from the middle, or by the ending; start by explaining to the audience where they are, what they’re going to see. It doesn’t matter that the program has the title of your presentation on it; odds are someone didn’t read it or hasn’t understood what it means. Start by giving context to your presentation and then tell your audience why it’s important.
This last bit is probably one of the most important things to do in a presentation, if your audience doesn’t know why your talk is important, they’ll stop listening. As you know, in Star Wars, Lucas first gives us the context for the story and then tells us a bit of the history: An evil empire, a rebel alliance, a princess in despair… All you need to know to think “Ah! This is important, I’m paying attention.” Try to give your audience a reason to pay attention, give them your theme’s context and explain why what you are going to say is important. You’ll see how they’ll be much more involved.
Until next time,
Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.
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Project Presentation- What you shouldn’t learn from your teachersLately I’ve been lucky enough to go to several universities and talk to students on how to make better presentations. The great thing about talking to university students is that most of them have not yet been spoiled by really bad presentations in the business environment. However, they have no examples on how to make [...] No related posts, sorry. […]
- 8 Presentation rules you should breakOver time I’ve been asking people I meet if there are any presentation rules they follow. I’ve heard a few that made some sense, and others which are just preposterous. There are two types of rules, I’ve identified, which come from different approaches to presentations: the first style appeared shortly after powerpoint gave the masses [...] No related posts, […]
- What you shouldn’t learn from your teachers
