Check out our latest presentation on SlideShare. “The Future of Work” is an educational presentation that explores how incredible technology is changing the way people collaborate on projects and work together on teams. Enjoy!
There comes a time when every company must grow up. Welcome to the new look of Apollo Ideas.
The new website is much more comprehensive — thoroughly explaining our services and the value we bring to organizations.
Be sure to check out our new portfolio. We’ve added example slides from more than twenty presentations we’ve worked on, as well as a dramatic before and after section.
We’ve also officially launched our Facebook and Twitter pages. You can follow us on either one for regular useful tips about presentation design and delivery.
We’re committed to growing as a company. The new apolloideas.com is just one of many changes we’ve been making to enable us to take on larger projects and deliver even higher quality results to you, our clients.
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?
Check out this great TED talk from Dan Ariely about human decision making. I personally love this kind of research. Though it can be a little disconcerting, it’s fascinating to learn about the brain and how we’re not always in as much control of our perception as we think.
Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist and the author of Predictably Irrational. From a presentation design standpoint, his talk is a perfect example of how a data-driven speech can be made captivating when combined with the magic ingredients — 1) good storytelling, and 2) visual slides.
Dan is one of these rare academics who bridges the gap between academia and the general public. His research is cutting edge in the scientific community, and he is able to share it (both writing and speaking) in a way that engages just about everyone.
I’ve had a chance to hear Dan speak in person several times and can say his presentations are always crowd pleasers. Enjoy!
Sprint’s new ad campaign, What’s Happening, is making some serious waves. The ads are brilliant examples of effective marketing and great presentation design.
Sprint spent a lot of money building a new 4G network and had to figure out how to show it off. They could have taken the traditional approach and created a campaign that explains the network’s new features (e.g. “you can transfer so many megabytes per second on our new network!”), but in reality people don’t care much about features — they care about benefits.
My favorite example of selling benefits instead of features was when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPod in 2001. He didn’t describe the iPod as a “4GB music player”; it was “a thousand songs in your pocket”. Big difference.
Sprint clearly understands the power of selling benefits because instead of focusing on what their network can do, their campaign demonstrates what people can do on their network, and on an incredible scale.
The ads are slick examples of how proper pacing, dynamic visuals, and the right amount of humor can make a fact and data driven presentation extremely compelling to watch. You’ll definitely find inspiration in these videos for new, creative ways to present your data in future presentations.
Check out one of the ads below.
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.
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