Presentation Skills, Presentation Design

This page includes a collection of resources that I hope will be helpful to you in creating and delivering presentations -- with and without technology.

If you know of something else you think might be useful, please share it.

"“Be passionate, tell a story, embrace your nerves and enjoy being the most confident version of yourself.”

    -- Clive Panto

Words of wisdom from one of the best communicators I know. There's more on his website, here.

I LOVE PechaKucha.  This presentation format - 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide for a total of 6:40 forces the presentation designer to focus on what the most important points of whatever they're presenting on.  As constrained as the format might seem to be, I've seen some of the best presentations I've ever seen delivered in this style.    Here's a PechaKucha about PechaKucha.  And here's some information about how and why the format evolved.

This site -- Brandy Agerbeck's Graphic Facilitation @ Loosetooth.com -- has a collection of "conceptual maps of conversations." They're cool.

This is Colossal This site is an "art, design, and visual culture" blog. Interesting stuff.

LIFE Magazine Photo Archive on Google - searchable archive of millions of photos originally published in LIFE Magazine.

10 Words your graphic designer wishes you knew. A short visual vocabulary lesson.

How to Give a Killer Presentation: Lessons from TED - reprint of a June 2013 Harvard Business Review article written by TED's curator, Chris Anderson.

Color Oracle - Color Oracle is a free color blindness simulator for Window, Mac and Linux. It takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see. (About 8-10% of males have some color blindness. I'm one of them.) The site provides links to some papers focused on the issues color vision impairment causes for cartographers, but they're pretty technical.)

Duarte's excellent book: Slideology.

Presentation Zen -- This is Garr Reynolds' blog. Reynolds is a presentation guru who authored my favorite presentation resource: Presentation Zen.

Reynolds frequently lectures on presentation design. If you browse through the blog, you might find his recommendations for 10 Non-PowerPoint books that will help you create better presentations. His presentation tips are especially useful (click the link "Go to Presentation Tips" to get to Preparation, Design, Delivery, etc,) Finally, here are some sample slides.

Edward Tufte's website - This site is the work of Edward Tufte, an expert on the visual display of information. He's written a number of informative books, including The Visual Display of Quantitative Information but the work that's likely most relevant to assignments you might have at DHS is an essay on PowerPoint.

Fast Company's Infographics collection - Fast Company is a magazine and website that (in its own words) "empowers innovators to challenge convention and create the future of business." The Infographics collection on the web has a number of examples of provocative and creative graphics that might give you some inspiration.

Adobe Color -- this is an Adobe Systems website for designers. It helps presenters develop color palettes -- among other things. Play with it. It's cool.

iStockphoto.com -- this is not a free site, but it has an extensive collection of very high quality and royalty-free photos that you might find useful as you're presenting.

"Stickiness" - According to Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick: Why some Ideas Survive and others Die, sticky ideas draw from a common set of traits, which make them more likely to succeed.

"Visual Magic of Comics" - a TED presentation by Scott McCloud on Comics

Death By PowerPoint - this is a "meta" PowerPoint. It's a PowerPoint about PowerPoint with some good advice and examples.

The Pyramid Principle - Barbara Minto's process for organizing and presenting your thinking. "It notes that people ideally work out their thinking by presenting pyramids of ideas: Grouping together low-level facts they see as similar; Drawing an insight from having seen the similarity; and Forming a new grouping of related insights, etc."