Ang Peregrino Recommends 38: Presentation Zen

Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen
URL: http://​www​.pre​sen​ta​tionzen​.com

Presen­ta­tion Zen is def­i­nitely one of the coolest blog sites I’ve ever vis­ited. It is a col­lec­tion of design ideas, pre­sen­ta­tion tech­niques and philoso­phies, and the zen of pre­sen­ta­tions. Look at it as an approach to pre­sen­ta­tion (as against a method). There are many meth­ods to pre­sent­ing, but to have zen in your pre­sen­ta­tions is about restraint and sim­plic­ity. So when you visit Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen, you won’t get rigid rules, but a way of look­ing and approach­ing your presentations–both the writ­ten (i.e. Pow­er­point or Keynote), and the ver­bal (i.e. the talk itself).

Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen chal­lenges the con­ven­tional wis­dom of mak­ing slide pre­sen­ta­tions and pre­sent­ing them and encour­ages you to think dif­fer­ently and more cre­atively about the prepa­ra­tion, design, and deliv­ery of your presentations.

“If there is one impor­tant pre­cept worth fol­low­ing, it is the idea of sim­plic­ity. The best visu­als are often ones designed with an eye toward sim­plic­ity,” says the man behind Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen, Garr Reynolds.

He is a for­mer Apple employee, and cur­rently Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Man­age­ment at Kan­sai Gaidai Uni­ver­sity in Japan where he teaches Mar­ket­ing, Global Mar­ket­ing and Mul­ti­me­dia Pre­sen­ta­tion Design. Garr is active in the Japan­ese com­mu­nity and can often be found pre­sent­ing on sub­jects con­cern­ing design, brand­ing, and effec­tive cor­po­rate communications.

Hav­ing said that, some prin­ci­ples might be help­ful. When you make your next pow­er­point slide and pre­sen­ta­tion have this at the back of your mind:

• Mul­ti­me­dia Effect. Nar­ra­tion with pic­tures (visu­als) is bet­ter than nar­ra­tion alone.
• Modal­ity Prin­ci­ple. Peo­ple learn bet­ter when words are pre­sented as nar­ra­tion rather than text.
• Redun­dancy Prin­ci­ple. Peo­ple learn bet­ter from nar­ra­tion & graph­ics rather than nar­ra­tion, graph­ics, & text.
• Coher­ence Prin­ci­ple. Peo­ple learn bet­ter when extra­ne­ous visual mate­r­ial is excluded.

Another prin­ci­ple is the 10÷20÷30 Rule of Pow­er­Point. This means that a Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion should have ten slides, last no more than twenty min­utes, and con­tain no font smaller than thirty points.

Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen is also a book (Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen: Sim­ple Ideas on Pre­sen­ta­tion Design and Deliv­ery) that has been trans­lated into many lan­guages. I think it should be a must have for those who present, give talks, are speak­ers in fora, or are just plain lovers of design.

For teach­ing us the Zen behind pre­sen­ta­tion design, for help­ing us bet­ter our pre­sen­ta­tion skills and design capa­bil­i­ties, Ang Pere­grino Rec­om­mends Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen this week.