My friend and fellow blogger Harrison Brookie recently sent me this great TED talk by David McCandless. For those of us who love data visualization, it’s a real treat.
My favorite line in the talk is:
“There’s something almost magical about visual information. It’s effortless. It literally pours in. If you’re navigating a dense information jungle, coming across a beautiful visualization is a relief. It’s like coming across a clearing in the jungle.”
Source: TED Blog
iPad is a presentation game changer. Since its launch four months ago, Apple has sold roughly four million units and they’re only just now rolling out to international markets. iPad is a solid success and the harbinger of a major computing paradigm shift. It inspires us to imagine new ways to approach presentation design and rethink the role a presentation can play in business communications.
It’s all about interaction.
iPad is the killer tool for the one-to-one presentation. It can connect to a projector like a laptop, but it really excels as an interactive device. iPad transforms a normally passive activity into an engaging experience. The multitouch screen means your audience can hold your slides in their hands. They can flick and tap their way through your content. They can interact directly with your ideas.
In this new paradigm, a presentation can be approached as an interface rather than a slideshow. Buttons can replace bullet points. The slide order can change for each audience member like a “choose your own adventure” story.
There’s no “best way” to create an iPad presentation, but there are several new ideas forming as the technology is explored. Here are a few types of presentations iPad can make better.
• Improved sales meetings – Instead of sitting across a table with your laptop, let your client hold your slides as you deliver your pitch.
• Dynamic product catalogs – Instead of bland spreadsheets listing products, offer your client an interactive digital catalog. Clients can touch their way into each product category and interact with each product through rich media and vivid descriptions.
• Seamless kiosk presentations – Instead of a computer with a keyboard and mouse, let your guests touch their way through an interactive presentation. Think about how slick a row of mounted iPads would look in your trade show booth.
• Gorgeous design portfolios – Instead of flipping through cumbersome Photoshop and InDesign files on a laptop, let your client flick through a dynamic, interactive portfolio. They can even see live mockups of your site.
• Quick app prototypes – Instead of static wireframes, create an functional prototype of your app, all in only a few minutes. There’s a great video tutorial for this here.
What other ideas for iPad presentations are out there? Please share some of your ideas in the comments.
Other iPad presentation resources & tips
“If you want to understand what makes the iPad special, you cannot look at what it has, but what it doesn’t have. The iPad is so thin and light, it becomes the display, and the display becomes the application. No input devices. The device vanishes and turns into the application you are using. The technology is transparent.” – CC
An Empty Canvas – A beautifully written article from the folks at Cultured Code. The source of the quote above.
Web design for the ipad – Tips for designing websites optimized for iPad. Good ideas for presentation design too.
Tips for an iPad compatible Keynote – Tips for using Keynote on iPad
iPad App Prototyping – How to make an app prototype using Keynote on iPad.
Keynote for iPad – The Keynote app for iPad
When I was a kid there were a lot of commercials for a board game called “Thin Ice”. The game was simple — one by one you piled marbles (penguins) onto a wet piece of stretched tissue paper (iceberg) until eventually the paper ripped and all the marbles fell through.
This game is exactly like the question and answer period after your presentations. When you ask for questions, nine times out of ten most people in your audience will just sit there, not saying anything, waiting for someone else to break the ice and ask the first question.
It’s a fact of audience psychology. People are shy.
So why not break the ice yourself? Instead of ending your presentation with the usual “Q&A” slide, end with a slide that lists three to five example questions people might want to ask.
Example questions make your audience feel more comfortable. You’re breaking the ice for them, so nobody has to worry about going first. And if you make the example questions simple, you eliminate the common audience fear of asking a “dumb question”.
Pre-prepared questions also enable you to have pre-prepared answers ready, making your Q&A look more like a continuation of your main presentation, and making you look more like a rockstar.
Pictures make presentations better. Here’s why.
A nautical metaphor.
Imagine a big wooden ship sailing into a stormy harbor. The waves crash as the sailors work to secure the ship against the dock. The more ropes the sailors can cast, the more securely the ship will weather the storm.
Think of the ideas in your presentation as ships docking in the stormy harbors of your audience’s minds. The more associations you can make with your ideas — the more ropes you can cast — the better they will be remembered.
The metaphor isn’t too far off from the actual biology of memory making. The more relationships you can associate with an idea, the more neural connections are formed and the more rooted it becomes in your memory. Most mnemonic devices play on this, getting you to associate additional objects or sounds with the thing you’re trying to remember.
Slides give you the opportunity to tap into parts of the brain words alone can’t reach — the picture parts.
Think of the visuals in your presentation as additional ropes to cast. It’s one thing to talk about your idea, it’s a better thing to show it.
Make a memory.
You can see this idea in action in the example slides below.
The slide on the left is a typical text-heavy presentation slide. It’s the speaker’s talking points in bulleted form. It contains everything the speaker is going to say, but doesn’t do much to make it more memorable. You could easily take this slide out and the presentation would be no worse without it — in fact, it may even be marginally better.
The slide on the right is the exact same content, but it uses a picture instead of words to relate the message. The speakers talking points have not changed, they’re just now being spoken instead of read. The audience has an extra trigger at their disposal, a visual cue, to make the content easier to remember.
Which slide resonates more with you?
It can feel risky to not include all of your content on a slide, to go with a visual instead, but your presentation is made stronger because of it. At the end of the day isn’t that the point?
Overloading a slide with too much information is an all too common presentation design faux pas.
Bullet point after bullet point — one for each idea you want to express — clutters the slide and forces your audience to spend more time reading than listening.
People often try to reduce the clutter with animations, building one bullet point on the screen at a time, but by the last build it’s still a bloated mess.
Instead, break up your content and put each point on its own slide. It’ll give your messages some room to breathe, making it less likely for you to overload your audience with too much information. Your story will be easier to follow.
Splitting up your content helps you the designer see which points can be enhanced with an evocative visual. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand bullets — so why not use one?
Great slides help you tell your story. Bad slides distract your audience, or worse, force them to work harder to understand you. Avoid bloated slides. Break them up.
It’s not rocket science.
It turns out there’s a scientific explanation for why we don’t remember much from a bad PowerPoint presentation.
Scientists studying “cognitive load theory” at the University of New South Wales in Australia have published a report that has shaken up the way the world looks at presentations and learning.
Their research suggests the human brain is good at reading, good at listening, but not very good at doing both simultaneously.
Presenting someone with the same information verbally and visually (e.g. reading from a bad PowerPoint slide) makes absorbing the information much more difficult. Our brains can only take in and remember so much at once.
Professor Sweller, a researcher in the study, said, “The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster. It should be ditched. It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form.”
He has a good point. Public speakers have been putting audiences to sleep with PowerPoint for years, but that doesn’t mean we should ditch the application all together. After all, it isn’t fair to blame the tool for the craftsman’s mistakes.
Don’t make ‘em choose.
Effective presentations never make life harder on an audience.
Professor Sweller offers good advice when he recommends we speak to diagrams instead of bullet points, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Keep the text on your slides to a minimum, phrases that only take a few seconds to read. Instead of bullet points, use diagrams and images as the backdrop to your story. When you’re presenting a longer quote, don’t be afraid to stand silently while the audience reads the quote for themselves.
Ultimately, the key takeaway is this: Never force your audience to choose between listening to what you say or reading the text on your slides. You can’t expect them to do both, and you might not like what they choose.
Presentation limitations
Have you ever opened a presentation someone sent you, only to find the text formatting too messed up to read? Chances are, the person who designed the presentation used a custom font you don’t have.
Custom fonts are a great way to make your slides more expressive, but they can cause serious problems when you try sending your presentation to someone else.
Presentation applications (i.e. Keynote and PowerPoint) don’t embed fonts into presentation documents. This means if you’re making a presentation you plan to send to several people, it’s best to use only universal fonts.
In the example below, I designed a simple slide using the custom font Trixie. The version on the left shows what the slide looks like on my computer, a computer with the font installed. The version on the right is the exact same slide, but on my friend’s computer, which does not have the font installed. Notice the difference?
If you use a PC, you don’t have much to worry about — almost all of the fonts that came installed on your computer are universal. If you use a Mac, you have to be a bit more careful. You have several great fonts on your machine that your PC brethren might lack.
Using type effectively is an art and a great way to make your slides more expressive. For presentations you’ll only deliver from your computer, feel free to go nuts using any fonts you want. But for presentations you plan to send to other people, remember to be careful with your font choices.
Note: PowerPoint 2007 for the PC does, in fact, allow you to embed custom fonts into your presentation. First, click “Save” and then click the “Tools” button. Select “Save Options“, and then click the “Embed fonts in the file” check box.
21 great fonts
If you’re interested in learning more about custom fonts, the link below highlights a collection of 21 of the most used fonts by professional designers.
It’s definitely worth checking out if you want to experiment with using a font other than Arial or Calibri in your next presentation.
InstantShift (via Monoscope)
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