The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method

How to combat fear of public speaking using Conference Room style presentations

With conference room style presentations, much of the time your audience is looking down at your handout rather than up at your projected slides--and you.  It makes a big difference.

Presentation Wisdom - Search Engine

Here's an idea: what if there were a search engine that covered all the best presentation sites, so that you could look up any presentation topic by searching all those sites simultaneously.

I used Google Custom Search, currently in beta, to create the Presentation Wisdom search engine, and primed it with the following sites:

http://www.extremepresentation.typepad.com/*
http://www.presentationzen.com/*
http://sixminutes.dlugan.com/*
http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/*
http://www.edwardtufte.com/*
http://www.indezine.com/blog/*
http://communicationnation.blogspot.com/*
http://perceptualedge.com/blog/*
http://talk.presentationsroundtable.com/*
http://www.curved-vision.co.uk/presentation-skills-blog/*

Try it: Presentation Wisdom.

I'm open to suggestions for additional sites.

More good stuff from Presentation Zen - the book

Here are some more snippets I found interesting in Garr Reynolds’ book:

“Concreteness: Use natural speech and give real examples with real things, not abstractions.” (p. 77)

“If you feel tempted to use a picture of two hands shaking in front of a globe, put the pencil down, step away from the desk, and think about taking a vacation or investigating aromatherapy”[!]—Nancy Duarte (p. 94)

Signal to Noise Ratio: “the ratio of relevant to irrelevant elements or information in a slide or other display. The goal is to have the hightest signal-to-noise ratio possible in your slides.” (p. 122)

Several examples of excellent Ballroom style presentations (p. 166-178)

A remarkable dose of clear thinking

Tom Asacker, marketing guru and author of A Clear Eye for Branding, has just posted one of the best and most clear-headed articles on branding I have read in a while - uncommon common sense at its best. It's called The Remarkable Chimera.

The article itself says nothing directly about presentation design, but it says a lot about hype and why it can be misleading, and therefore why you should avoid it. And I think that lesson does apply to designing presentations.