Zen and the art of presentations
I wrote recently about Mike Parkinson’s excellent book, “Business Dollar Business Graphics”. Another title that’s become an absolute favourite of mine in recent months is the wonderful “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds, which I picked up in the bookstore at this year’s APMP conference and have dipped back into regularly ever since. Garr has a blog, too – it’s well worth clicking to have a look.
It’s really made me stop and think about our own presentations and those we help our clients to put together. We make no claim to be graphic designers, but we do get pretty actively involved in the process of developing, planning and rehearsing proposal presentations. Most of the PowerPoint packs I see (and, hey, why do presenters always default to a slide presentation?) are based on fairly similar design principles, with a corporate logo floating around somewhere on each page of a standard template comprising three common components:
- an area for the heading
- space in the middle for the main graphic (at least no one’s using clip art these days!) and text (often the dreaded bullet-point list)
- a footer, often with the page number, copyright statement and similar.
This book’s ethos is all about simplicity. It’s full of examples of high-impact designs that break free from these conventional ‘wisdoms’ and make it far easier for the reader to absorb information – with bold, striking, full-screen graphics and far, far fewer words.
As Garr writes in the book, “We’ve learned some ineffective habits over the years. The first step to change is letting go of the past.” It strikes me that we’re at a tipping point with presentation design, and this is the first book I’ve seen that really captures what I think great presentations are going to look like in the coming decade.
This article was written by Jon on 13 October, 2009 and filed under Processes & best practice. If you found it useful, you can with others. To receive automatic updates, subscribe to The Proposal Guys via 
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