Presentation Zen

The "purple cow" of presentation design firms

Last Friday I took the long flight from Osaka to San Francisco, arriving Friday morning, six hours before I left. I made it to Mountain View in Silicon Valley in the afternoon to meet with Nancy Duarte, Mark Duarte, and many of the team at Duarte Design, a firm which specializes in presentation design. I gave a short presentation for many on the team and had a small tour of the company. I had to leave early the next day, so I was delighted that I could spend a couple of hours at Duarte before driving up here to Oregon the next day. There are several firms and individual specialists which do presentation design in the United States, but I don't think anyone approaches the quality and expertise of Duarte. These guys are the "purple cow" of presentation design. It's no surprise, then, that their clients include many of the top brands in Silicon Valley.

Though I was dead tired from sleep deprivation and jet lag, I had a fabulous time at Duarte Design. I was very impressed. They have a wonderful philosophy and approach, an incredible client list, and a terrific working atmosphere. No wonder they are so creative! The company has such a positive and relaxed atmosphere.

Duarte Design has a real appreciation for the need to appeal to the logical and the emotional aspects of presentations and presentation graphics. From the Duarte website, your can get a good feel for how Nancy and her team "takes an outline or half-baked slides and transforms them into a clear presentation that wins customers for her clients." Checkout these five great articles by Nancy which appeared in Presentations Magazine.

Duarte Design delivers great visuals in the end. But in the beginning of the process, they "go analog" and often take the client's ideas and create a sketch of possible visuals. Here you can see a sample concept sketch for an infographics project for Cisco (click "slideshow"). Duarte does a fantastic job of showing its work on its website. Also checkout their work on presentations, motion, infographics, etc.
   
The Chico connection
Several of the staff at Duarte are graduates of California State University, Chico. Chico State has a fantastic design program (Department of Communication Design), and in fact Duarte has set up a small office in the town of Chico as well. I'd heard about Chico State's great design department before. In fact, one of my close friends in Japan received her design degree from Chico and has always praised the quality of her experience there. She now is a very successful designer, working with some of the world's top brands in Japan. Chico State is obviously doing something right with their design department. If you're thinking of getting a degree in design, I'd give Chico State a look.

(Read an interview with the Duarte Design founders.)

The size of your deck is not important

A lot of people ask me how many slides they should use in their "PowerPoint deck." That is, how many slides should be used for a single live presentation? My answer these days is "between zero and a thousand."

When I gave my "Art of Presentations" presentation last week at P&G in Kobe (for ACCJ), someone asked me at the end how many slides I had used. So I asked people what they thought. How may slides did I use, I asked (I spoke for 55 minutes). Guesses ranged from 40 to 60. The answer was 285. The audience was at once surprised and amused. Then I asked them, imagine if I had said something like this at the start of my presentation: "Hello, everyone. Thanks for coming. I have 285 slides to go through tonight, so let's get started...." The audience burst out laughing. One man said, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, that he would have ran for the exit doors had I opened that way. And with that, the audience got it: In my presentation, the number of slides was obviously not important. The slides simply supported the talk. People were not conscious of how many slides they had seen or "where I was in the deck."

It's not the slides, it's "the moment"
Once people start counting slides, all is lost. The focus should be on the message and the moment. And "the moment" is a kind of synchronicity among presenter, audience, and supporting visuals that allows the audience and presenter to have a connection that is more like conversation and sharing and less like a didactic stream of bullets, "chart junk," and a ceaseless, incessant "blah, blah, blah" that an audience must endure. A presentation approach which resembles a speaker "getting through a deck of slides" treats the audience like a room full of video recorders. Mutli-media learning theory and cognitive science suggest, however, that this approach is not inline with how people most effectively handle new information. (See this older article, and works by professor Richard Mayer, such as this book).

It's the wrong question
If your audience is conscious of the number of slides you are using — "too many" or "too few" — then that usually means you have inappropriately designed your visuals or are using them in a way that is not helping much. It's not the number that is the problem. I have seen both good and bad presentations that used no more than 10 slides, and I have seen both good and bad presentations that used more than 250 slides. I talked about this idea in my post on the Lessig Method a couple of months ago.
   
OK, but seriously, how many slides do I suggest? Honestly, it is not something I worry about. There are a million things to worry about, but the size of my "PowerPoint deck" is not one of them. So, maybe the best answer I can give you is to use the "appropriate amount" of visual support. And only you (and your coach if you have one) will know what that is. As John Loori says in The Zen of Creativity, "...make a choice about what's important, and let go of the rest." And the number of slides is not important.

Related Presentation Zen links
Are we asking the right questions?
Should lectures be conversational?

Spreading the word

Seth Godin says, "The more you give away, the more it's worth" (see original slide). I agree. If you want your ideas to spread big, then you've got to evangelize and get others to want to evangelize your idea or cause. You can't pay evangelists though. You can't pay your friends to love you and you can't pay strangers (or customers) to love your ideas. Apple User Groups,* for example, are incredible communities full of unpaid "Mavens" (a la the Tipping Point) that help spread knowledge about Apple products and technology, provide invaluable tech support (that Apple can't provide), and have "converted" a great many people "to the Macintosh way." What I'm talking about goes beyond just "selling" your idea, though. So what's the difference between a sales approach and an evangelism approach? According to the "father of evangelism marketing," Guy Kawasaki, "Sales is rooted in what's good for me. Evangelism is rooted in what's good for you." (See Father of Evangelism Marketing).

I'm trying to spread an idea. I'm trying to do my very small part to rid the world of awful, ineffective, time-wasting "PowerPoint presentations" that leave both presenter and audience feeling uninspired (at best). The idea that I'm trying to spread is that conventional wisdom about presenting is completely off kilter. Borrowing from the works and examples from such people as Lessig, Kawasaki, Jobs, Atkinson, Tufte, Sierra, Takahashi, and many others, and drawing on influences from the worlds of visual communication and design, Zen, cognitive science, multimedia, etc., I am attempting to shake things up a bit. The aim is to expose people to other ways of presenting and to get them thinking differently about their presentations. The more people hear me (and others like me) speak the more valuable this idea becomes. So, in the spirit of Guy Kawasaki's call that we revolutionaries "poop like elephants" (give of our time and spread our ideas generously), I gladly "give it away" when I can. And so do many, many others. It just makes sense to do so.

Evidence of my "pooping"
A few people have asked how the "free presentations" went last week, so here are some pictures from two of my presentations where I "gave it away."

    
Above: Speaking here in Osaka for the Osaka Sister City Association. Really nice people. Had a chance to mingle for an hour after the presentation over some tea and delicious desserts.

   
Above: Presenting for ACCJ at the Far East Headquarters of Proctor & Gamble in Kobe. A crowd of about 115 in attendance on a Friday night. (They had to bring in extra chairs). I spoke in English and had a simultaneous interpreter in the booth above. Some in the audience listened to the interpretation through headphones. The auditorium feels kind of like a mini United Nations. Wonderful place.

   
Above: I was happy a few of my Gaidai students attended the event. From left to right, Rafael (Philippines), Julie (Kenya), me (USA), Jesse (Canada), and Jose (Ecuador). (The image on screen is available at istockphoto.com).

      
Above: Since the last time I presented at P&G, they added a monitor in front of the stage which mirrors what's on the large, bright screen behind the speaker. This is a wonderful thing. No excuse now for anyone presenting there to hide behind the podium. Great facility. I even made a PDF of my Keynote slides and loaded those on the house PC. That way if my Mac froze (there's always a first time) I could just press a button and switch to the PC already connected and ready to go.

*(Although you can not pay evangelist groups, such as Apple user groups, I would like to see Apple engage these user groups more and make them feel a little more "part of the team.")