First came the overhead projector (1940s). Then came the slide projector (1950s). The digital projector supplanted both (1980s-90s). All of these machines display images on a large screen or wall so that an audience can see them. Originally, the point was to show groups of people something that couldn’t be articulated easily. Why waste time describing something inexactly when you can just show a picture of it? The projector became a new tool to help an orator communicate a complicated message. A good speech could be delivered so much more vividly and efficiently with the occasional reference to appropriate visuals. Yes, such a thing is difficult to do. Public speaking is a difficult skill to learn. Nonetheless, the projector made such a scenario possible.

Then something went wrong; something went horribly, horribly wrong.

Digital projectors require computers and computers require software. Those wanting to simulate slide projectors use slideware, notably Microsoft’s infamous PowerPoint programme. Suddenly, the images you could project dropped in resolution. A printed photograph or diagram can contain a lot of detail. An overhead projector could also display detail, albeit not as much. In contrast, early digital projectors displayed a measly 640 by 480 pixels or 800 by 600 pixels. The slideware conforms. Even today, twenty or so years after the invention of slideware, we’re lucky if the resolution gets up to 1024 by 768 pixels. Initially, the range of colours was also restricted. Yet these shortcomings were ignored because office workers could throw up so many more slides with so little effort at virtually no expense. Just as computer printers made it easier to churn out typed documents by the truckload, projectors and slideware made it easier to churn out slides … and then print them … by the truckload. Now we’re drowning in documents conceived as slideshows.

But that’s not the most horrible side-effect of slideware. As with many aptly named “killer apps”, slideware changes the way we think and work. This isn’t change for the better.

To digress for a moment, the spreadsheet is the archetypical example of a mind-bending “killer app”. The spreadsheet programme is the third major invention that allowed powerful people to conceive of an organisation as sets of numbers. (Double-entry book-keeping and bureaucratic records management are the other two inventions.) Executives could see their organisation in miniature as a set of tables. Different scenarios could be modeled instantly by manipulating the figures. This made an organisation seem like an abstract, impersonal thing that could be managed by moving resources around. Executives rarely get the chance to see all of their people. Most executives never watched how their people actually did their jobs. But they could see the people every day in the form of numerical proxies (usually as expenses). Too few executives met with the organisation’s workforce before but spreadsheet models provided just another excuse not to.

Slideware also created a major shift in mindset, one which further reinforced the abstraction. After the widespread adoption of slideware, many office workers were no longer required to produced reasoned documents with logical structure and detailed appendices. They could throw their ideas onto slides in abbreviated form … move words around … draw circles and squares around words … link words with lines and arrows. Workers could also express themselves using lists: bulleted lists, composed of little communicative farts. “Thinking through” a problem became something done on-screen. Unlabeled lines and arrows became the new verbs. Noncommittal “action words” in lists are sometimes verbs but mostly verbified nouns. Yet these so-called “action words” weren’t even necessary. The chain of reasoning no longer had to cohere through sentences and paragraph structures; the reasoning would become apparent with cryptic word-bundles on a succession of slides. But—and this is a big but—each digital slide doesn’t hold very much. As information designers put it, the information resolution of these documents—the amount of substantive information contained within—is very low. Today, when handed a set of printed slides, most of us can’t make much sense of it. The set only makes a little sense if we know something about the background, jargon, and context of the original presentation. Yet that hasn’t stopped people from treating their presentation slides as documents that can be passed around.

As this was happening, the early promise of projectors had become lost. We are visual animals. Visuals help us comprehend things quickly. Projectors gave speeches for large audiences a visual dimension. However, slideware gave us clip-art—silly, badly drawn illustrations that are used as ornament, not as description nor explanation. Impenetrable blocky and rounded diagrams became the visual of choice among the more serious minded. Suddenly, the usual conventions surrounding the construction of tables and diagrams were said to longer apply. The shift towards nonsensical abstraction continued. Few realized that visuals, whether complicated or not, need to be designed to best convey meaning in a clear, efficient, and appealing way. And design is a discipline that is both art and science. Instead of becoming visually literate and design savvy, slideware users resorted to built-in templates and cut’n’paste eye-candy. This is composition on autopilot.

Audiences no longer give their full attention. Actually, audiences are now rather cranky, just not cranky enough to revolt en masse. Terms like “death by Powerpoint” have entered the language. Slide presentations have become the time when bored bureaucrats answer their e-mail with Blackberry devices.

As Edward Tufte (2003) explains in his landmark essay, this way of communication doesn’t compliment human cognition.

PowerPoint’s convenience for some presenters is costly to the content and the audience. These costs arise from the cognitive style characteristics of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, an intensely hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narratives and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous chartjunk and PP Phluff [clipart], branding of slides with logotypes, a preoccupation with format not content, incompetent designs for data graphics and tables, and a smirky commercialism that turns information into a sales pitch and presenters into marketers. (Tufte, 2006, p. 158; emphasis in original)

Some critics have argued that Tufte overdoes his argument by opposing projectors and slides out of hand. That’s not true. I’ve seen him present live and he uses them (sparingly). His essay is about the limits of the medium as it currently exists. He argues that the nature of the content should dictate the choice of medium and format of communication, not the medium dictating and warping the content. He’s right.

Tufte’s essay caused a small insurgency, so to speak. He sold millions of copies at seven bucks each. No one knows how many copies were photocopied and passed along. A few powerful office-czars insisted on holding meetings without slideware presentations. Business pundits and speechwriters began to offer pat advice about how to make presentations less boring. Unfortunately, some of these cures just make things worse. “Only use ten slides!” “No more than six words per page!” “Four bullets per slide MAX!” The pundits got one thing right: craft a compelling oratory with slides that complement the speech but don’t use slides as the main centre of attention. However, these crude rules are no substitute for design. They are just another form of autopilot. Tufte’s underlying message is that effective communication requires more thinking, not less thinking. And so the real revolution never came.

That’s not to say that aspiring revolutionaries have gone into hiding. We’re scattered around the world. We’re scattered within organisations. We’re looking for way to demonstrate good presentation design. We’re looking for alternatives to problematic techniques and the dependence on slides. Some of us are running companies that help a monied few to tell their stories more effectively. And now some of us are publishing books. In the spirit of revolutionary fraternité and constructive criticism, I’m going to discuss three of these books. One is so-so. One is good. One is excellent.

Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes
by Andy Goodman (Cause Communications, 2006), pp. 93.

The so-so book is Andy Goodman’s Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes. It is written in the concise guidebook format, which is another way of saying that it’s less than a hundred pages long. Consistent with the format, the book also has an appendix with checklists and sources of additional lessons. It is aimed at those who work for “public interest” organisations. So if you happen to work for a non-profit organisation you can get a free print copy by applying to the publisher. That’s how I got one. If your organisation exists to gather filthy lucre, then you can download a free digital copy from the publisher’s web site.

A unique aspect of Goodman’s book is that it starts with the issue of public-speaking aptitudes and self-perceptions. Goodman conducted a large survey of people working in the non-profit sector. The results show that half (49 percent) of all respondents think they give good presentations. However, only 18 percent think that others give good presentations. The same can be said for the quality of visuals (46 percent versus 19 percent). Goodman concludes that a significant proportion of people are in denial. However, I would point out that this is a common cognitive bias. Studies consistently show that a large majority of people think of themselves as above average in their work and think of colleagues less favourably. So Goodman’s numbers are lower than I would expect, not higher.

Goodman proceeds to group people into five categories based on their self-assessments. One of these groups, the “unplugged”, don’t use visuals whatsoever but consider themselves to be good at speaking (17 percent of respondents). The rest consider themselves to be: (1.) well-trained and continually improving “all stars” (18 percent); (2.) confident and thoughtful “naturals” at presenting (20 percent); (3.) reluctant but competent “draftees” (23 percent); and (4.) “jitterbugs” who know that they’re below par (17 percent). It should be noted that this type of analysis—called cluster analysis—can be quite inexact and subjective. These percentages rely heavily on how the statistical procedure is set up. That said, it’s interesting that only a fifth of respondents acknowledge that their presentations stink. So, perhaps there really is a lot of denial out their. Goodman thinks that it’s because people don’t have many role models to follow. Few really know what a good slide presentation looks like. The bar is set too low.

According to Goodman, the design of the presentation should achieve a communication goal: how you want the audience’s thinking or behaviour to change. This requires the speaker to figure out who the audience is, what their existing views are (including “anti-learning” attitudes), and how they ought to respond. The presentation starts with a “hook” (a compelling story, a provocative image, a shocking statistic) and ends with a prepared take-away message. In between, the presentation should explain a few main points, preferably by using stories, and include some sort of interaction to break things up. The interaction could be a question-and-answer session, although Goodman is arguing for some sort of exercise that gets audience members to start applying what they’ve learned. Goodman breaks down an hour-long presentation into the following stages.

I’ll state the obvious: this structure doesn’t seem revolutionary; in fact, it seems down-right conventional. The most popular conferences (such as TED and Pop!Tech) are abandoning long-form speeches in favour of punchier twenty minute talks. Young professionals are holding presentation workshops using the pecha kucha method (trademarked as Ignite): 20 slides + 15 seconds per slide + automatic slide changes = a 5 minute presentation on a topic. Goodman’s structure is quite staid by comparison. Goodman doesn’t advocate a full hour. He advocates using only as much time as is needed. If that’s 20 minutes, so be it. But he does recommend interaction and that adds time.

Goodman argues against Tufte’s view that slideware is the root of the problem. It’s the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” sort of argument that Tufte’s critics favour. How should the software be used according to Goodman? Don’t treat the slides as a document. Don’t overload the visual channel of cognition by using slides containing both images and lengthy passages of text. Slides should contain mostly images. Don’t use slideware default settings and busy templates. Don’t put logos on every page. Don’t use images that look too much like run-of-the-mill stock-photography. Don’t dump all of your bullets on the screen at one time: bring them on one-by-one instead. Use animation to deliver information gradually. Animate text in a way that makes the animation meaningful. To demonstrate this advice, Goodman offers some before and after pictures. I’ve created a mock-up that resembles one of Goodman’s make-overs.

I hear the sound of a car screeching to a halt. I grant that the second slide is an improvement. It’s less busy. The image has a somber realism to it, a realism that corresponds to the subject matter. (Notice how the positioning of the girl at the edge of the slide gives the subtle appearance of isolation; a centred girl would convey a slightly different message.) However, many of Goodman’s make-overs seem to be timid steps towards real reform. He keeps bullet lists intact. The bureaucratic jargon stays, which is particularly unfortunate because bureaucratese makes it difficult for audience members to imagine the reality being described. What Goodman’s book needs is a section about design principles and how design helps a presenter achieve certain communication goals. Both words and visuals need to be brought into concert.

Goodman offers more advice about presentation delivery and the set-up of the venue. His insights about eye contact, vocal control, and body language are brief yet useful. There is advice for handouts and presentation evaluations. Overall, however, it is difficult to think of Goodman’s book as anything but a useful primer. The length limits the amount of detail he can devote to each aspect of presentations. That’s probably why he points to so many other sources for additional guidance.

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery
by Garr Reynolds (New Riders, 2008), pp. ix, 229.

Garr Reynolds takes the skill level up a notch as he applies the Japanese zen analogy to the creation of presentations. As a philosophy, zen is said to be about minimal aesthetics, mindfulness, and con­nect­ed­ness. The zen aesthetic values are what should guide the design of the slides. What are those, exactly? The most important are simplicity (kanso), naturalness (shizen), and elegance (shibumi). Simplicity is achieved by removing anything that isn’t essential and trying to get a bigger effect by using less. The ideal is wabi-sabi simplicity, which is best translated as an austerity that isolates those essential elements. Naturalness is about restraint: not using elaborate designs and making things overwrought. The third value, elegance, is an understated beauty and “subdued refinement”. That means avoiding ornamental decoration, brash colours, and anything else that could be viewed as gaudy or indulgent. Reynolds doesn’t describe these values completely and his descriptions overlap a bit. He also tosses a few extra values in without any explanation whatsoever (subtlety, suggestiveness, tranquility, and stillness). Nonetheless, you get the gist. He’s advocating a minimal, purposeful, and tasteful slide design.

And piles of rock have something to do with all of this. There are lots of rock-pile pictures in this book. It’s an icon for zen-ness, as in the zen of Japanese gardens and American cosmetics commercials. Here in Canada, that same pile of rocks is a national symbol that means “person like” (inukshuk), even when it isn’t in the shape of a person (inunnguaq). That’s not so zen. What’s my point? There is a tension between the use of visuals and the perpetuation of clichés, plus some clichés don’t travel well across cultures. The next book I discuss addresses both issues head-on. I learned this lesson the hard way when I taught a course in Brasilia city and discovered, shortly after a presentation, that the “a-okay” hand gesture doesn’t mean “a-okay” everywhere. Apparently, in some places, it’s a request to go have sexual intercourse with yourself. Oopps.

There is another cultural divide that zen aesthetics have to overcome: workplace cultures that encourage visual busyness, brashness, and neglect. According to Reynolds, simple presentations with lots of empty space on slides are often interpreted as a lack of preparation. The opposite is true. It is easier to put too much onto a slide. It is perceived as less risky too. The result is, what Reynolds calls, “slideuments”: large sets of slides, each packed with dense bullet-points, lengthy text, and busy graphics. Distilling the message to its bare essentials requires a great deal of thought, creativity, and synthesis. It is clutter that is the bad habit. The slides should only be an aid to the presentation.

So what is the Garr Reynolds method? There are two parts: design and delivery.

Much of Reynolds’ approach to design is off-the-shelf; quite literally off-the-shelf, drawn from Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind (2005), Heath & Heath’s book Made to Stick (2007), and introductory graphic design. The main tenets can be summarized as follows.

Notice how the two sets of ideas correspond loosely. I didn’t until I lined them up. I sense there is a new conventional wisdom in formation. The larger point that Pink makes (yellow stickies) is that these are thinking skills that you should be developing in order to thrive in the “Conceptual Age” we’re now living in. The point that the Heath Bros. are making (blue stickies) is that, by applying these tenets to the way you craft messages, you are better able to persuade in a memorable way. Reynolds sums this up by arguing that you have to make people care by conceiving and presenting your ideas in a succinct and creative way.

Reynolds is less absolute about graphic design principles and techniques. Simplicity and lack of clutter are the main themes. This is done by (a.) maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio of each slide (remove pixels that aren’t required, including logos), (b.) using pictures to tell your story in a concrete way, and (c.) directing the eye with empty space. This often involves breaking bullet lists down into separate slides, with each resulting slide composed of an image and a text snippet. Reynolds further advocates using contrast (colour, size, positioning, et cetera), using repetitive elements across slides (visual themes), and aligning items carefully on slides so that they look clean and organised.

Strangely, Reynolds doesn’t mention visual hierarchy, even though it is one of the first principles that a graphic design textbook would mention. I say that’s strange because, after introducing his list of principles, he then demonstrates the principle of hierarchy by showing the design of a title slide. This involves making items more or less prominent depending on their importance or the order in which you want the viewer to look at each. For a title slide, as an example, you would make the title more prominent than the subtitle, the subtitle more prominent than the author’s name, and the author’s name more prominent than the author’s title. Prominence can be accomplished by making an item bigger and bolder, placing it closer to the top, and so forth. I guess the word hierarchy doesn’t sound all that zen. It is crucial nonetheless.

Speaking of zen, when Reynolds talks about presentation delivery, the analogy pretty much breaks down. He throws in some Asian symbolism (judo, swordsmen, and clearing the mind in a zen-like way) but that doesn’t quite cut it. Oh well: better to abandon the analogy than to stretch it beyond recognition. So Reynolds advocates being engaged in your talk without being self-conscious or egotistical. There is a need to balance practice with real spontaneity. He talks about being “in the moment.” There are some tips, such as keeping the lights on so that you can be seen, removing physical barriers (such as a podium), and making sure you have a rhythm that respects the audience’s attention span. All of these things help the speaker connect with the audience.

The main weakness of Reynolds’ book is the section about using quotations. Enhancing credibility is the only reason cited to put a quotation on a slide. Reynolds quotes Tom Peters to provide his rationale:

“… my conclusions are much more credible when I back them up with Great Sources. I say pretty radical stuff. I say “Get radical!” That’s one thing. But then I show a quote from Jack Welch, who, after all, ran a $150 billion company (I didn’t) … Suddenly my radicalism is “certified” by a “real operator.” (p.141)

That, ladies and gentlemen, is Tom Peters trying to justify the fallacy known as the appeal to authority. Yes, such appeals can be effective. That’s why we shouldn’t use them: underhanded forms of manipulation only get you credibility until you encounter someone who knows better. Why should I believe what you say just because of a name-drop? Great authorities often get things wrong, which is why a claim or argument should stand on its own merits. Moreover, your name-drop might backfire because you may not know what your audience thinks about your “Great Source”. Here’s my favourite Tom Peters quotation displayed on two slides made in Reynolds’ preferred style.

That confession (Peters, 2007) is about the evidence used in Peters’ first book (Peters & Waterman, 1984), arguably the most influential management book of all time. Notice how he prefaces his confession with two weaselly disclaimer-phrases. I chose to put those on a separate slide because it emphasizes how much of a slippery character Peters is and it builds anticipation for the punch-line. It also reduces the amount of text on each slide, something which Reynolds advocates. The colours amplify the punch-line: from an appeal for mercy (white) to a devilish guilt (red), although that is something which is culture-specific. The picture of a small beer emphasizes the meagerness of the disclaimers, which is connoted by the folk-saying used by Peters. The picture of the Pinocchio puppet conveys my judgment about Peters breach of research ethics, not to mention my opinion of him as a “Great Source”. The positioning also serves as a giant exclamation mark.

The lesson that Reynolds fails to mention is that quotations should stand on their own as a thought-provoking insight. Alternatively, they can describe something in the most apt and efficient way. Or they can make a point in a way that is particularly memorable. However, quotations should not be used as a cheap appeal for street-cred. Empty sloganeering gets you nowhere either. Leave those usages to the hucksters and the wannabes.

Using pictures in this way does raise awkward questions. Do these slides smack of manipulative advertising? And aren’t people increasingly suspicious of those types of sales pitches? If the picture is used as part of a shallow emotional appeal, or to subtly alter perceptions, I would say “yes” to both questions. If the picture is used to aid description and explanation, I would say “mostly no.” If the picture is used to guide attention, add levity, and make messages memorable, then the answer is not so clear cut. Imagery is part of the rhetorical toolkit. (I use “rhetorical” in the classical sense as the art of communicating your intended meaning.) Emotions and the subconscious will always play some role here. There is a need to be conscious of how your imagery will likely influence the audience and to refrain from pulling emotional triggers in an underhanded way. If audience members have finely tuned bullshit detectors, then lack of care will cause your presentation to be dismissed out of hand. Your goal shouldn’t be to persuade only the gullible.

My comments may suggest that I don’t like Presentation Zen. I do like the book. There is a lot of good advice about how to create a clear and tidy presentation. I also have a personal preference for clean and minimal aesthetics. However, there is so much more to be said on the subject. And for that we have to turn to a truly excellent book.

Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations
by Nancy Duarte (O’Reilly, 2008), pp. xix, 274.

Nancy Duarte’s book Slide:ology is difficult to summarize because of the large number of topics it covers. Each two-page spread is devoted to a different topic and each topic is nicely illustrated. The book is nearly comprehensive: all of the basic information is there to design slide presentations that are as good as the ones Duarte’s company produces for its clients. Those clients include the most celebrated slide presenters, notably Al Gore and Steve Jobs. For technical details about how to operate the software, however, you have to look to a different source (e.g., Atkinson, 2005)

I first learned about this book at the VizThink 2008 conference in San Francisco where Duarte was soliciting feedback for an early draft. She displayed a poster containing an enormous number of icons, each representing a graphic that can be used to organise slide information. That list has since expanded and forms the content of the classifying diagrams section of the book. There are over 250 examples of flow diagrams, structure diagrams, cluster diagrams, radiating diagrams, pictorial diagrams, and data displays (pp. 45-58). That’s an invaluable resource by itself, one that I’ve used as a reference several times since the conference. To give you a sense of what I’m talking about, here is a murky photograph of part of that poster.

I wonder why the “point” category didn’t make it into the book. I suspect that the arrows were seen as diagram elements rather than proper diagrams. That’s a tough call because many diagrams in slide presentations are simple arrows connecting two things or two families of things. Or the diagram is a picture or map with an arrow pointing something out. Regardless, as far as I’m concerned, this list alone is worth the price of the book. If you’re ever stuck trying to figure out how to display a complicated set of concepts, this is a good place to look for inspiration. Duarte’s also offers some sound advice about how to combine diagrams and how to make diagrams space efficient (and, thus, make slides that are tidy).

Both Duarte and Reynolds argue that you should start conceiving the presentation away from the computer. Slideware was never designed to be a tool for composition. Indeed, the two authors will be holding day-long workshops (called Presentation//Reboot) in which participants never get near a slideware programme. After creating a presentation on paper, you might conclude that there is no reason to use slideware at all. Duarte offers a list of alternatives to slide projection, such as flip charts, videos, handouts, props, and hand-held devices. And if details need to be communicated, put some effort into creating a decent set of handouts as a take-away item.

Duarte thinks of presentations as an ecosystem in which message, visual storytelling, and delivery are in harmony. Time needs to be set aside to focus on the composition process. Audiences should be profiled and their needs and wants identified. Presenters have to do what it takes to make them attentive listeners. Next, Duarte advocates sticky notes for brainstorming and sketching for story lines and complicated ideas. You should also get feedback on your rough drafts to check that they make sense to others. A technique called word mapping can be used to discover concepts, sayings, and imagery that best suits the ideas to be communicated (without resorting to cliché). She also makes an important point about the need to be constantly aware of the visually designed world by taking an interest in film, art, design publications, et cetera.

When it comes to turning sketches into a slideware presentation, Duarte places design and design-thinking at the forefront. As she puts it:

Design is not solely about making things aesthetically pleasing, although that is part of it. Design, at its core, is about solving problems. And whatever that problem is—from squeezing oranges to running faster to communicating effectively—designers strive to help users solve their dilemma in the most convenient, simple, and elegant way. Essentially, designers focus on the experience, making it as beautiful and memorable as possible. To succeed as a presenter, you must think like a designer. Every decision a designer makes is intentional. Reason and logic underpin the placement of visual elements. Meaning underscores the order and hierarchy of ideas. (p. 83)

This involves orchestrating the various aspects of a slide in a way that maximizes signal and minimizes noise. These aspects include arrangement (contrast, hierarchy, unity, space, proximity, and flow), visual elements (background, colour, text and images), and movement (timing, distance, direction, pace, the flow of the eye) (p. 88).

I’m not going to review every bit of design advice that Duarte offers. For that you have to buy the book. But I would like to highlight a few ideas that I find most interesting.

Duarte’s discussion of data talks the reader out of all sorts of bad habits such as using noisy charts. Much of this advice references Stephen Few’s writing about information dashboards, which involves a similar design problem (making data meaningful given the constraints of limited screen real-estate). I’ll defer to my review of his book for those lessons. Duarte adds some interesting slide-specific advice. I’ve mocked-up some examples that are roughly comparable to the ones in the book.

The first is, what Edward Tufte calls, a single-number semi-table. Sometimes a single number can have such a big impact that it is the only thing you need to cite to make a point. This can be used along side a picture to make a better connection with the subject. The other two examples use icons to reinforce the message that a number is very big or very small. I based the water-usage slide on Tim Kekeritz’s excellent infographic “Virtual Water” which uses the same technique (from Klanten et al.’s Data Flow, 2008, pp. 206-207). I left a title out because, presumably, the speech or previous slides make it clear that the subject is water usage; titles don’t have to be used on each slide because, remember, the slides are visual aids not portable documents. The examples that Duarte uses have a much bigger emotional impact because they reinforce each other and relate to a very serious subject (the lack of clean drinking water in poor countries).

Duarte also places a lot of emphasis on colour theory and type setting, both mainstays of graphic design. She teaches us how to develop colour pallets and work with them. Not only does colour provide contrast and aesthetic appeal, but colours can have specific meanings (e.g., athleticism, earthiness, or playfulness) and reinforce an organisation’s brand. Duarte reminds us to stay away from certain colours if we’re in a particular industry (e.g., red has a negative connotation in the finance industry). She also recommends dark backgrounds for large venues and light backgrounds for small ones. Ultimately, you will create a colour pallet that includes primary, secondary, and highlight colours. The photographs you select should complement this pallet to maintain consistency and avoid distraction. As for type, Duarte argues that type on slides is analogous to type on billboards—both are “glance media” that should be readable in three seconds or less. Most billboards opt for sans serif typefaces (e.g., Tahoma or Helvetica, not Times). She then puts the reader through a boot camp of type tweaking. She reminds us to use bullets sparingly, introduce them one-by-one, and to ignore any pat rules about how many to put on a slide. Amen to that.

To get the most professional look, presenters should refrain from just throwing images onto slides. Instead, Duarte advocates developing an “image system” in which all of the images fit together as a set. Perhaps they’re all black and white photos with the same distinctive boarder. Or they have a similar colour pallet. Or they’re illustrations drawn in the same style. Or they’re diagrams that use a consistent pattern of colours and lines. Just don’t use cheesy stock-photography and clipart. Two examples stood out for me. One involves drawing contrasting illustrations on top of photographs. The other involves blacking-out a person from a family photograph to emphasize that the person is dead and has left a large family behind. In both cases, Duarte is playing with your expectations for dramatic effect.

The section I didn’t expect to find in Slide:ology is the one about animation. I’ve seen so many badly animated slides; slides where the animation is eye-candy and distraction. I’ve even seen animation crash a few computers mid-presentation. Duarte advocates using animation sparingly to reinforce a message. She correctly points out that humans instinctively look for movement, which is why irrelevant animations can be such a distraction. So why not use them to your advantage? Duarte gets much of her inspiration from the film industry and advocates using movement in a calculating way, as a film director would. The most interesting example she provides shows how a series of events unfold by moving small characters around a small fortress (it can be found here under “170, complex stories”). Simple slideware animations (the object-fade-in and object-fade-out functions) give the appearance of an actual cartoon. The most useful animation, one which I use all of the time, involves using the push transition to create more space or step someone through a sequence.

Duarte shows how you can push slides in various directions to pan around a larger story-line or picture. The slides above depict the fable of the blind men who attempt to describe an elephant. The slides suggest that there is a danger of using this approach if you don’t also give the audience the bigger picture. That said, this technique can be extremely useful. I would add that video and animation are areas where Apple’s Keynote slideware offers much more than Microsoft’s Powerpoint … strike that, Keynote does almost everything better than Powerpoint.

What makes Slide:ology such a good manual for the workplace is that it doesn’t ignore the organisational context. Throughout the book, Duarte provides advice about reinforcing an organisation’s brand and advice for dealing with colleagues. She also includes a chapter on how to create corporate templates the right way. An organisation interested in communicating effectively should also build a shared image library.

My final verdict is that Duarte’s Slide:ology is a must-read book. It’s also the only book you need out of the three reviewed here: she covers most of Reynold’s big insights and mentions Reynolds at several points in the book. Besides comprehensiveness, I also like how Duarte speaks to the novice or poor presenter without baby-stepping them through the material. That means an advanced presenter will also find the book a worthwhile read. Moreover, an advanced presenter can easily skip material without loosing Duarte’s train-of-thought because of the modular design of the book. Her examples are a great inspiration. Slide:ology is a beautifully designed book.

Within the grand scheme of things, it is important to remember that slideware presentations will never be the way to communicate everything. The books reviewed here acknowledge that fact. Yet, these books have done a great deal to rehabilitate the use of slideware. If you’re interested in improving the quality of information flowing through your workplace, then it would be a worthwhile investment to have you and your colleagues take these lessons seriously.

By Peter Stoyko

Update (13.02.10)

I’ve been meaning to provide an update to this review essay for quite some time. The essay has become far more popular than I’d anticipated.

Two months after writing, I talked to Nancy Duarte face-to-face in San José. I asked her about the omission of the arrows category from her taxonomy. She confirmed my suspicions, as mentioned above. I took her course four months later. I got a lot out of it, even though I’d already read Slide:ology. She offered some new advice and revealed material from her forthcoming book. My impression is that her follow-up book will emphasize oratory performance, storytelling technique, and speech composition, although I expect more advice about visuals too. I wait eagerly. Apparently, Duarte has done a lot more research than the talk-circuit hacks and crusty toast-meisters who currently occupy that niche in the pop literature (not a high bar, it should be said).

One of my biting criticisms of Presentation Zen wags a finger at Raynolds’ meagre and derivative advice about design. Reynolds published a new book recently. Lo and behold, it’s called Presentation Zen Design.

REFERENCES