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While snuffling around on the Internet on Monday, I found a link via Guy Kawasaki’s blog to an interesting site called "Presentation Zen". After reading The Art of the Start by Kawasaki in which he talks about his presentation rule called 10-20-30, following a link from his site was a safe bet. Check it out…
Some particularly interesting things on the Presentation Zen site are four presentation ’styles’ that the writer, Garr Reynolds, lists. They are the styles of Lessig (Lessig’s homepage), Godin (Godin’s homepage), Kawasaki (Kawasaki’s homepage), and Takahashi (couldn’t find a homepage).
Lessig’s style, which I’d never seen before, shocked me most as he displayed more than 200 slides during a presentation…never stopping on one for more than a few seconds, sometimes displaying a few each second. Takahashi’s style is timed differently, with similarly simple messages being displayed (like Lessig) but far fewer slides. Kawasaki proposes that ‘ten important things’ be presented in twenty minutes with a minimum of distractions. The length and rapidity of slide display may vary, but each one follows the common thread of slides that have minimal words and no distracting illustrations or titles. Why?
The slides *are* the illustration and titles. The ‘content’ is what is spoken aloud.
Interesting stuff…but wait, there’s more!
In all of these is the implicit message that the slides exist solely to support the rhetoric and not distract the audience with detail. All focus is pointed at the words of the speaker. These styles capture interest (and convince or sell or convert) but do not to provide granular detail during the presentation.
For example, Lessig’s style is hard for me to follow as words keep popping while he talks about copyright law. I get his ‘refrain’ while watching it…but it’s hard for me to absorb the details of his presentation. Now, I read Lessig’s books and I adopted the Creative Commons license as a result…but it’s still hard for me to follow his presentation, which covers the same material as the books.
So if rhetoric is the primary purpose, then the current crop of ’simple presentation styles’ is good. But if the need is to have a serious discussion, especially a decision-making discussion based upon data, then these presentation styles might be good for starting discussion but should be abandoned once the discussion is framed.
At that point, it’s time to get out the Tufte and think about how to present complex data in such a way that the presentation explains the intended meaning (or directs discussion) with a minimum of confusion or distraction. Each has it’s place and neither should be neglected…but that’s a whole different topic…
