Duarte wants to change the landscape of visual presentations, and her book provides the philosophy and techniques that we need to begin to make more effective presentations. Drawing upon her experience as a leader in presentation design — her firm is responsible for the design of the award-winning An Inconvenient Truth presentation by Al Gore — Duarte outlines the elements that make up an effective presentation design, and provides many real-world examples of these elements in action. She does not give too many details on specific tools and functions within particular slide presentation programs; instead, she provides the reader with the design theory needed to create an effective presentation.
The book contains a few things that surprised me while also clarifying some aspects of presentation design that I had gathered from my own experiences. With all the bells and whistles built into desktop presentation publishing programs like PowerPoint and Keynote, it is easy to see why some presenters go overboard in their attempts to incorporate those bells and whistles. Duarte points out that simple slides with few message points have greater impact, and that two-dimensional graphics convey more meaning to audiences that flashy three-dimensional images. When planning for a presentation, she recommends using sticky notes to create a storyboard, and strongly emphasizes that slides should contain conclusions, not data sets. She cites Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule as a good guideline to follow, and advises presenters to leave plenty of time (3-4x the length of the presentation) for preparation and rehearsal.
By the time I finished reading this book, I was racking my brain to think of some reason why I would need to create a presentation with slides just so that I could apply the design ideas I had read about. slide:ology is likely to be as influential in the presentation world as Garr Reynold's Presentation Zen was a few years ago, and I highly recommend that this be required reading for anyone giving presentations using slides.
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