Slide:ology – The art and science of creating great presentations is an interesting book written by Nancy Duarte and published by O’Reilly Media.As the title shows the final intent of the book is helping to create better visual presentation that will capture and inspire your audience.
How to do that?
When you have to do a presentation you usually need to tell a story to a public that is your target. When we talk we usually, consciously or not, adopt both verbal and gesture communication. A visual communication is how we can complete our story to better engage our public.
Unfortunately this is not easy. The book is full of technical advices about visual communication but, if not to be a designer, at least it needs to do a lot of practice and time to study some basic concepts.
When our chief comes to us asking for a presentation it usually consider that it is needed “for yesterday”. Possibly you are not in the design or in the marketing department but you have to do your best. That’s why Microsoft Power Point has become so famous as presentation making software. You just have to take on concepts from here and there and fill in the white space. Than, just to insert a bit of movement, you can add several transition effects. That’s all.
Yes it is. If you don’t mind your audience attention, if you don’t mind to attract with your (or your chief) exposition or ideas then “That’s all”. On the other hand, in this case, you have completely missed the communication intent. You have just dumped what you have to say in a one-way conversation.
Duarte’s Slide:ology suggests that there are a few more things about graphic design you might want to know and that you are going to make your audience happy if you stop giving slide presentations that consist mostly of text you’re going to say anyway.
This suggestions is valid both if you are not a slide technician and even more if you work in the marketing and want to take-out a result from your presentation.
Together with the tips the book presents several case studies. Because of the Duarte Design mostly have pretty famous customers you may be intimidated by case studies such as Al Gore or Cisco System presentations. By the way the keyword idea Keep It Simple is valid to anyone.
In a well studied visual presentation nothing is casual in the same way as an advertising product. Everything is accurately constructed. You need to use the power of colors, you have to know how to create the space, how to choice photos that work together well, how to write less and show more because what in needs to be said it is all up to you. You are the focus of your presentation and slides are the visual support to your message.
Conclusion
I really loved to read this book that I found easily catching. It’s clear that to an easier use of this book you need to have to already know some basic graphic design techniques. Things that are obvious to a designer, such as grids, photo coherence and color palette, are a mess for others.In the end I think that this book can help in some way who, for chance, need to prepare a presentation but is surely more adapt to designer that want to specialize themselves in the presentation practice.
