jancology.com

My last presentation on a Unilever conference was different then all others I did. I had not a lot of time during the day and did most of the work at home. However, at home I only use my PowerBook so the presentation had to be done using that machine. That was a little risk as I’d never used it for business and it was never hooked up to a beamer. But I can say that all went well and even better then expected. Using tools that are fun to use, I think you can get more creative. I decided to do it radically different then any presentation I did before. Normally I use PowerPoint with loads of bullet points as it helps me to remember what to say. This time I took advice from Guy Kawasaki and from a few Apple Keynotes I’ve seen. The main point is this:

“The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.” — Guy Kawasaki

The slides are used to enforce the presentation and are not to be used to “read at home”.

Second important thing is to use quality graphics. Well,not all my graphics are top quality but a number of them are at least original and never shown before. So it was fun to do and got good feedback.