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

Not everyone is happy about the use of presentations in the legal industry.

There are some who think presentations force lawyers to dumb down their content for the jury. I’d argue it’s not the tool that’s responsible, but rather the person using it. The power of any presentation is all in how it’s used, and great visual storytelling has the potential to give lawyers a significant competitive edge. You could even say their future depends on it.

Texas lawyer David Bissinger makes a compelling case for multimedia in the courtroom in this recent article from Law.com.

A compelling case exists that using multimedia increases juror competence. At least three reasons should prompt trial lawyers to use, and trial judges to embrace, multimedia devices. First, scientific and other high-level learning depends upon visualization; the best advocates, like the best teachers, teach by using visual aids. Second, multimedia argument advances the ancient art of advocacy through storytelling. Third, the forces of technological innovation will put lawyers who fail to embrace these methods out of business.

Check it out: Article Link

The misuse of PowerPoint is bad. I’ve been saying it for years, but now the US Army says it too. Check out this recent article from the New York Times. Link

The US Army reports the misuse of PowerPoint has become a major problem. As the article describes it, PowerPoint is seen as a military tool that has spun out of control.

The spaghetti-like diagram above was taken from an actual military PowerPoint slide. It’s designed to show the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan. (Definitely doesn’t follow the Apollo Ideas mantra of clear simple expression.) As General McChrystal, head of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, describes it, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”

According to McChrystal, complex diagrams aren’t even the biggest problem — bullet points are. And they’re the same problem with your company’s presentations.

Bullet points are just rigid lists of facts. They do not convey meaning. They only barely convey information. What’s worse, they are proven to lead to bad decision-making, poor judgement, and reduced creativity.

This isn’t the first time the government has recognized the PowerPoint problem. Several years back NASA identified the misuse of PowerPoint as a contributing factor to the Columbia shuttle disaster. You can read more about that on Edward Tufte’s blog here. It’s fascinating and tragic.

PowerPoint is a bad reporting tool. When it’s used properly, it can take a presentation from good to great, but bullet points and slick templates won’t do it.

It’s truly amazing how much bad PowerPoint costs organizations in lost opportunity and time. Can you think of another business tool that even comes close?

Thanks to the many friends and readers who sent in this article!

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.

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

Check out this awesome video presentation created for Daniel Pink’s new book, Drive. It’s a fantastic example of how a video presentation can tell a short, powerful story to sell an idea. Production credit goes to the very talented Lindsey Testolin.

About the presentation

Duke Children’s Hospital needed a new way to tell their story. They wanted to strike an emotional chord with their audience, conveying the importance of the hospital and the countless lives they affect. The presentation was to be shown at The Teddy Bear Ball, the hospital’s large annual fundraiser gala, so it also had to honor the hospital’s many departments and staff.

Our job was to synthesize a huge collection of facts and anecdotes into a single, powerful presentation that was relatable to a non-medical audience. I’d like to share with you some of the thoughts that went into the presentation design process, with several tips you can use for your future presentations.

Tips from behind the scenes

Choosing visuals to depict the work done by a hospital was a challenge. Early on in the process we made the choice to not show any photos of sick children or children undergoing surgery — it’s just too depressing. We wanted to focus on the transformative nature of hospitals, not the reasons for visiting them. So we went abstract and used brighter, happier images while avoiding the stock photo cliches. Rule #1 was always be respectful to the seriousness of the content.

The story has a clear transition from the past to the present. We underscored this transition with the way we used photos in the slides. For the sections about the past, the photos have white borders and shadows and are dropped onto the slide, with the text lying outside the borders of the photos. It creates a look and feel of an old scrapbook. For the sections about the present and future, the photos switch to full-bleed (they are extended to the edge of the slide) with the text incorporated into the images. This more modern, professional feel pulls the audience into the content in a vivid and visceral manner.

The theme of the presentation was “our story,” so we used a repeating visual of children reading storybooks. At the start of each new section, there was a pause in the rhythm and an image of a child holding a brightly colored storybook. This motif culminates at the presentation’s emotional climax with a bold slide depicting a row of huge, brightly colored storybooks. “Our story is just one part of millions of much bigger stories.”

Similarly, we heightened the emotional impact of the story’s climax and ending with an old filmmaking technique. Throughout the presentation, the photos of the children gradually go from wide-shot, to medium close-up, to close-up. By drawing the perspective in closer to the subject’s face, the audience is drawn closer into the storytelling and will make a stronger emotional connection with the content.

I hope you enjoy our presentation and this glimpse into the presentation design process on a project like this. Duke Children’s Hospital is a wonderful organization that does some truly amazing work. It was a pleasure working with them.

Link to presentation video.

(The video version above is set to music from Disney-Pixar’s Up!)