Over the past few months, I’ve
found myself returning again and again to Garr Reynold’s blog Presentation Zen.
A friend at Duarte Design recommended I read his book, also titled Presentation
Zen. If you have to make and give presentations, and most of us do, Garr
Reynolds is an amazing
source of wisdom and practical advice.
Being in advertising, presentation is part of daily life for me. I’ve sat through my share of mind-numbing presentations consisting of slide after slide crammed with too much data and too many bullet points. And while I’ve always struggled to keep my slides simple, it’s always been, well, a struggle. Experiencing Garr’s extremely minimalist approach really made the scales fall from my eyes.
Garr’s signature presentation style makes use of quality images displayed full-bleed or elegantly layered against a dark background, with very few words employed to make the most fundamental point. The basic idea is: one slide, one point. At first I thought his approach was more appropriate for lecture-style presentations, in which the presenter is performing in front of a larger audience, and that it wouldn’t work in real-world client meetings.
However, after a few months of progressively peeling away the layers of information in my slides, I had an opportunity to create a presentation on content marketing and social media, and decided to go for broke. I was pleasantly surprised by the results and the positive energy in the room.
Most of us go into a presentation in a defensive mode, expecting that our audience wants to see rock-solid proof of every point we plan to make, or an irrefutable chain of logic. And the result is … slide after slide crammed with too much data and too many bullet points. I think the value that Garr brings is in demonstrating that if we can let go of our fears, stop hiding behind our slides and step out in front of them, using them to illustrate and emphasize what we want to communicate, we will all be more effective presenters.
It takes discipline to capture one simple idea on each slide and to rely on our own mastery of a subject to furnish the fuel for our talk. It means we have to know what we’re talking about and have the confidence not to read off the screen. So, for anyone who labors over the order of their bullet points, I recommend losing the bullet points and reading Garr’s book and blog.