Charts are often an important part of a presentation. You can visualize complex data with charts. But I’ve seen some horrible visual usage of them; the slides with charts are often cluttered, the data is displayed too small and sometimes irrelevant or superfluous data is included.

What’s the solution? [click to continue…]

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I’ve been asked several times to present infront of a different “type” of people to that I’m usually used to. For example, recently I was asked to present infront of a group of full-time scientists. Of course this is a challenge and I could just turn it down. But I think these are the presentations where I can learn the most from. I will have to adjust the presentation a bit, and I will most likely make more mistakes than I’m used to, but at the same time I think I will learn more than from other ‘ordinary’ presentations.

So these are the times where you can learn a lot - so it’s doubly important that [click to continue…]

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However you want to think about it, you will always realize that content is very crucial. I used to be obsessed with design; when creating a website, I would start with some tiny content, and once that is up, I would spend the rest of the time creating great design and I would forget about the content. But that’s not what people want. People want content! [click to continue…]

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Yeah, finally another Presentation contest, I’ve been waiting for one to pop up again (I hope Slideshare also has one again this summer!). Though you can somewhat see Pecha Kucha Nights as an informal (and fun!) contest. On their website it reads: “The PowerPoint Live Design Contest is open to anyone and everyone: your mission is to create the slide design that would be used for the conference template. If chosen, your design would be used in all of our seminar tracks by just about all of our presenting team.” [click to continue…]

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I didn’t post for almost a week due to a (really needed and relaxing) spontanous short vacation. It did give me a chance to read a couple of books - among them: slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte.

It’s a well-designed book (who would’ve guessed it?) and when first flipping through I really liked the fact that it includes a lot of diagrams and images and case studies - it’s a really hands-on book. [click to continue…]

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I was at a sustainability award ceremony once, and going towards the end of the whole thing, the 5 or so winners along with the host of the award were on stage. Then the host was told there were still 5 minutes left before the start of the next part of the program. Until now everything went fine, I think the host did a decent job, everyone was talkative. But what came after that was just weird. [click to continue…]

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Images and photos - when used correctly - can be very effective in supporting your presentation. Personally, I would much prefer it if people used many more pictures in their presentations. It’s cliche but true: A picture is worth a thousand words. So imagine you are trying to explain to people about why they should visit Indonesia. [click to continue…]

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In a previous post I wrote on why handouts are important and how they can relieve you of writing down everything on your slides. In this post, I want to get into a bit more detail on what elements a handout should contain. Of course every person will have their own preferences and do let me know if you have your own ideas on how to create presentation handouts. [click to continue…]

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Twitter has grown quite considerably since it was founded and especially in the last few months. With it, many things we do in the area of technology have also changed.

#preso or #ppt?

It’s been to some (though only little) debate, what hashtag should be used to follow presentation-related tweets (hashtags are sort of like identifiers with which you can follow a certain topic - in this case: presentations). [click to continue…]

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Every now and then you will have a really important presentation and you might invest a lot of time into it, more than usual. You want to make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible. So, how do you know when you’ve practiced enough? When do you know you’re good enough? In these sorts of cases, I like to think of this quote from the movie “Shine”, where a prodigy piano player is practicing to play a difficult piece from Rachmaninoff (called the “Rach 3″ in the movie to make it sound cool). [click to continue…]

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After only 1 1/2 months, the subscriber base of this blog has already reached 100!! To celebrate this, I have created a handy one-page presentations checklist! All you need to do is subscribe to the FREE email newsletter and you will gain immediate access to the checklist! If you are already a subscriber, just subscribe again - instead of landing on the subscription page you will be directly forwarded to the download page (make sure to enter the email address which you have used to sign up).

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In the past few weeks there has been some buzz on this new presentation software called Prezi. It’s quite an impressive thing and a couple of weeks ago it finally went public, so if you have some spare time, check it out, they have a free version available. It IS quite a cool tool, the question is, whether or not it will become a hit. [click to continue…]

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When I saw Lawrence Lessing’s Presentation at TED, I was quite amazed at how he did it. If you haven’t seen it, you can view it at the end of this blog post. He uses a LOT of slides but most of them are pictures or only contain a few words. The slide would change every 3 to 15 seconds (some of them include animations or video clips). [click to continue…]

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Go here for Part 1 on creating stunning presentation charts

Shadow
A technique I like to use a lot is to use shadows. But not too much - using drop shadow is like using make-up: Just putting on a little bit can make it look better, use too much and it will probably look horrible. The difference is not hugely visible, but to me even the subtle difference is nice. [click to continue…]

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Having lived in Indonesia for 20 years, I really enjoyed Willie Smits ‘ talk on how he sustainably regrew an area of rainforest on the island of Sulawesi (where my mother is from, coincidentally), taking into consideration cultural, economic, social and environmental issues in the area. His talk was very strong and you can see it that he was determined and passionate about what he did. At the end he deservedly received a standing ovation! [click to continue…]

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