Almost everyone gives presentations, whether informal discussions about website design or a large interactive agency pitching a new digital marketing brand. This article covers some presentation suggestions inspired by Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen and his general philosophical approach to presentations. We use these suggested techniques in presentations during the web design process as well as during educational sessions.

At Synotac, we explored these ideas during a Lunch + Learn on January 10.

When planning for a presentation, we can easily get distracted by providing too much information, creating overly dense slides that distract from our presentation, or talking for an “impressive” amount of time.

I am working with these three core ideas to help shift my presentation style towards engaging stories that provide value for my audience:

• Take my time
• Less is more
• Be present

Take my time

Creating a good presentation takes time — both serious chunks of time to consider the presentation goals, content, and audience, but also “spaces” to let the ideas percolate and mellow.

Sometimes, there won’t be time either to really develop the presentation contents or reflect on the contents, but ideally there will be plenty of time to let the presentation evolve.

Don’t underestimate the difficulty of creating a good presentation! Ideally, use different tools (index cards, post-its, big pieces of paper) to encourage your thinking to move beyond your initial expectations and linear thinking.

Less is more

This idea can be applied to both the presentation contents as well as the visuals, typically slides, for the presentation.

We often think the longer we talk, the more value we are providing. Unfocused rambling or a fire hose of data will undercut our key points. If your presentation can be made in twenty minutes, don’t fill an hour with talking. Sometime you’ll be lucky enough to have an hour available, and this is a great time to think creatively about activities and other interactive options for the time.

Our slides also fill with unnecessary clutter and dense information, confusing your key points and also distracting the audience as they try to read the slides while listening to you.

The slides at the bottom of this post are from the Lunch + Learn — they are not meant to make sense without my presentation, but do give an idea of slides that are hopefully supporting the presentation.

Be present

This applies both to the preparation for the presentation and when giving the presentation itself. Even if you are only going to speaking to the audience without interaction, by really being engaged with your presentation, the audience will also engage.

For many of the presentations we do for web design, we get to have lots of interaction with our audience, which allows us to change gears, shift focus, and otherwise improvise once the presentation begins. This is a great opportunity to make sure we are really connecting with our audience, but only works when we are really present with our audience

Resources

• Presentation Zen: Simply Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, Garr Reynolds, 2008.
• Garr Reynold’s website as well as his books since 2008 on presentation.
• Nancy Duarte’s website and books
• Prezi: a tool for building presentation visuals beyond slides
• Presentation examples:
  • Bobby McFerrin’s brain hack (and many other TED talks)
  •  Hidden Power of Smiling (also from TED)
  • Drive with whiteboard drawing
  • Pecha Kucha
  • Gel Conference

Synotac Lunch + Learn: Presentation Zen slides