What shape is your presentation? Flat? Round? Spiky? It’s an unusual question, but a very effective one for diagnosing the biggest problem affecting most presentations.

PowerPoint often guides us down a bad path from the very start. The built-in templates conform us to a very rigid structure — titles and bullet points on every slide. Essentially, they encourage us to create a series of isolated lists, which is an ineffective way to structure your presentation.

Hills and Heart Rates

Before PowerPoint existed, people thought of presentations as speeches, and we tend to approach speech writing differently from presentation design.

There aren’t any visuals to rely on in a speech, so it’s up to our words to make the content interesting. For this reason, speechwriters focus on the narrative, or the overall structure of the speech.

Speeches are round, like hills. They’re usually in the story-plot structure, which consists of an introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. If we abstractly charted a speech, it would look something like this.

Slide presentations look very different. The standard presentation format (template) encourages us to create an isolated series of lists (titles & bullets), and so we end up presenting our material as just that.

It goes something like this: After our title and intro slides, we toss up a slide with a single topic (e.g. “Competitive Landscape”). We say everything we can about the topic, then move on to the next slide with a new topic (e.g. “Market Size”), where we say everything we can about that. This repeats for about ten to twenty minutes until we come to a slide titled, “Conclusion”, where we abruptly stop talking and ask for questions.

Slide presentations are spiky, like the beeping heart-rate monitors you see in hospitals (EKGs). That spiky shape is the reason so many presentations are so boring to sit through.

Wired to remember

Humans love stories, and we’re all natural storytellers. Every time we chat with friends we’re telling each other stories, and we’re not usually reciting a series of isolated lists to one another.

Our minds are wired to take in and remember round information much better than spiky information. This is why you can remember the details of a famous speech or the plot of a good movie, much easier than you can remember the items on your last grocery list. Your brain processes round information better because round information is saturated with meaning, which is the key requirement for memory formation.

So when you’re working on your next presentation, remember to consider its shape. Bullet points aren’t the problem — the way we’ve grown accustomed to using them is.

Keep it round, avoid the spikes.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss some of the inspiration behind THIRST in an interview with Geetesh Bajaj from the Indezine blog.

View the full interview here.

Indezine is a comprehensive web resource for all things PowerPoint (tutorials, tips, downloads, and more). If you spend a lot of time in PowerPoint, you’ll definitely want to check it out.

I normally don’t like to bring up politics here, but this is a moment worthy of an exception.

History was made last night when Barack Obama won the 2008 US presidential election in a landslide victory. While I disagree with John McCain’s use of negative campaign tactics over the past several months, I congratulate and applaud him for his sincere and graceful concession speech. He nailed it, expressing a caring and appropriate message of unity that you can tell came from his heart.

Barack Obama’s victory speech, delivered to a crowd extending far into the night, was yet another one for the record books. Barack Obama is arguably the best communicator ever to be elected US president. He is an example of the tremendous power a strong, balanced, and confident person has to inspire and lead others. He is, without doubt, a role model to us all.

It is a very exciting time to be an American.

Great presentation design starts with the right approach.

The digital dilemma

How do you begin making a presentation? Most people start digital. They sit at their computer, open up Microsoft PowerPoint, choose a shnazzy theme, and start churning out titles and bullet points. A few hours (and several clipart images) later, the presentation is “complete”.

Unfortunately, this method often leads to the boring presentations we’re all used to. It puts the emphasis on your bullet points instead of the story you’re telling.

Effective slides emphasize the important messages in a presentation. They don’t double as a giant TelePrompTer to read from. Remember, bullet points are not talking points.

The right foot

Instead, try starting analog. Grab a pen and paper, find a comfortable place to work, and dedicate an hour or two to brainstorming your presentation away from the computer.

Consider these questions: What’s the purpose of your presentation? Why were you asked to speak? What does the audience expect? What does the audience already know? What’s your main point? What’s your most important message? Why should your audience care?

Initially, pretend your presentation will be a speech without slides. Sketch out some talking points for how you’d deliver that speech. How would you frame your content to make it compelling? What stories would you share to emphasize your message?

After you’ve put your ideas down on paper, then start thinking about your slides. What sort of visuals will enhance your message? Approach each slide as a blank canvas, not just a space to list your talking points.

Starting analog yields better results because it helps you focus on the story you’re telling, instead of lists of bullet points.

I like starting with a pen and paper because it gives me the freedom to write haphazardly and sketch pictures at the same time. If sketching isn’t your thing, a word processor works fine too. The point is just to avoid presentation software and slide templates at first.

Give the analog approach a try. Keep your focus on the story you’re telling and you’ll be surprised by how much better your next presentation turns out.

The results are in, and I am thrilled to announce my recent presentation, THIRST, was selected as the best presentation in the 2008 World’s Best Presentation Contest on SlideShare.net!

THIRST is an educational presentation designed to spark the conversation around the impending world freshwater shortage. I’m proud to report it’s working. Since it was first released just two months ago, THIRST has spread across the web and has been viewed over 60,000 times.

This year’s World’s Best Presentation Contest attracted 2,415 presentations from over 130 countries across 5 continents. The judges were four top gurus of the presentation world, Guy Kawasaki, Bert Decker, Garr Reynolds, and Nancy Duarte.

It’s truly an honor to have won the contest for a second year in a row. I extend a warm thank you to everyone who showed their support.

Jeff -

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Check out this presentation I created and entered into this year’s “World’s Best Presentation Contest” on SlideShare.net. The contest attracts entries from all across the world on a myriad of topics and is a great source for design inspiration. This year there are some very creative entries, so be sure to check them out and vote for the ones you like best. You can vote for THIRST by visiting this page.

THIRST is an educational presentation that explores humanity’s water use and the emerging worldwide water shortage—topics I deeply believe people need to be aware of. I designed it to function as a stand-alone presentation, which means the slides tell the full story (no need for person to deliver it). I’d love to hear what you think. Enjoy!

World’s Best Presentation Contest