The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method

New layout that passes the squint test

I am in Redmond, Wa. all this week running workshops at Microsoft. One of the participants in yesterday's Extreme Presentation workshop, Ian Peacock, a product manager at Microsoft, came up with an interesting example of a page layout that I had not seen before.

The layout represents three options that are screened through three criteria, which eliminate the first two options, leaving one option that satisfies all the criteria. Thanks Ian.

Great Ballroom style presentations

And if you're looking for advice on how to develop great Ballroom style presentations, there is no better place to go than Garr Reynolds excellent blog Presentation Zen. Yesterday's post has some very dramatic and powerful examples. His basic principles can be found here, but you'll want to spend time exploring the rest of the blog because it is rich with great ideas and examples.

36 slides that pass the Squint Test

In an earlier post, I explained how to design pages that pass the squint test, to achieve the simplicity aspect of what Edward Tufte calls "simplicity of design and complexity of data." At that point I promised to share 36 examples of such pages. Here they are; you can download them in two versions.  The first version is a .pdf file with thumbnail images of all 36 options, six per page for a total of six pages, which you can quickly flip through each time you are trying to decide on a page design (these are the ones that are illustrated here on the blog). The second version is a PowerPoint file with all the 36 slides; copy the relevant ones to help you create your own presentations.

Download 36_page_layout_ideas.pdf and Download SlideTemplates.ppt  Please send me examples of any new variations that you create, and I will post them on this blog for others to use.