Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Oct - Featured Book



Full Title: Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery
By: Garr Reynolds
Published: Jan 2008

Garr Reynolds is a former Manager of WW User Group Relations at Apple Computer, and is a currently a Marketing and Multimedia Presentation Design at Kansai Gaidai University in Japan.

In this "How-to" book, Presentation Zen, Garr offers a fresh teaching approach to presentation design. Garr organizes his book into three sections Preparation, Design and Delivery. Within these sections Garr stresses Clarity, Simplicity and Naturalness.

He cautions not to begin writing your presentation in PowerPoint, and instead to get out a notepad or scratch paper and jump into the creative process feet first. Imagine Shakespeare writing Romeo & Juliet in PowerPoint slides, it would have proved creatively impossible. Before digitizing your presentation, write it down on paper, yellow post-its, or a whiteboard. Generate a lot of ideas and then cut away the unnecessary information, then prioritize and organize your main points.

Garr also stresses not to "Data Dump" or simply paste entire excel sheets full of figures into a PowerPoint slide. Instead Garr asks readers to crunch the numbers first, consider the implications and wider relations and sum up the conclusion on each slide. He points out that the slide is not the place for you to walk the audience through a detailed walk through a process, that is better left to an actual printed document with deep explanation. Rather every slide should state a conclusion, a key takeway that the presenter can expand upon during the presentation.

This is a new and valuable approach to presentation design in a digital and information rich society.

External Review
"Please don't buy this book! Once people start making better presentations, mine won’t look so good. (But if you truly want to learn what works and how to do it right, Garr is the man to learn from.)"
Seth Godin, Speaker and Blogger & Author, Purple Cow

References
Garr Reynolds speaks @ Google March 2008 Video
Garr Reynolds Presentation Tips
PPT Review of Presentation Zen
Presentation Zen @ Amazon.com

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