Reading or interpreting text out loud is easier than it sounds. I’m going to highlight some of the pitfalls that I have come across and try to provide appropriate solutions too.
Have you run into a situation where you need a photo for a slide and you either can’t find one that works and looks just right on services such as iStockPhoto or for a shot like this, you can’t justify paying for a photo of some Sharpies? You can try the Creative Commons route at flickr, but even then it’s a crap-shoot whether you’ll find something worthy of being included among your slides.
Well, a lot of us presenting slide design bloggers have suggested using your own photos in place of stock photos when you can. Not only can it be cheaper, but you’re guaranteed to be the first to use that particular photo.
Read more as Mike provides some useful tips on creating the photos
Michael Hyatt has compiled a list of the tools he uses. It is practical and very useful.
Just for grins, let's cover some examples of logical fallacies that we often hear about PowerPoint -- the tool many love to hate.
http://www.maniactive.com/states/2009/01/top-6-fallacies-about-powerpoint.html
Here is a secret for all speakers:
“You will never fit everything in”
I have seen many presentations where the speaker says “I have three points to share”, and then about five minutes before the end, he says, “Ok, and now my second point…”. This inevitably ends up in his presentation going overtime, or on him rushing through the last two points of his presentation.
This usually happen because the speaker is desperately trying to fit everything in!
The trick is to realise that you will not fit everything into your speech.
http://www.craigstrachan.com/blog/2009/01/you-will-never-fit-everything-in.html
Even the best messages can be ruined by a bad presentation. To get your information across effectively and to generate the right response from your audience, you need to know how to use audiovisual technology to your advantage.
Interested in how to improve your presentation? Read on for some audiovisual presentation dos and don’ts.
[From Boing Boing]
So many of the epic problems that Obama is going to be wrestling with over the next four years involve systems of great complexity and scale: the bailouts and stimulus programs, our national energy use, the immense expenditures involved in fighting two wars, the global scope of climate change. Tufte would be the first person to argue that complex systems like these are not easily explained using sentences and statistics, particularly when we're talking about such vast numbers. I can imagine a White House address on the stimulus package, or his long-term plan for energy independence, where instead of sitting at a desk reading from a teleprompter, he's actually walking us through the problem and his proposed solution with a backdrop of visually arresting and memorable slides. That would actually make for more stimulating television, and at the same time do a better job of communicating the issues.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/19/the-case-for-powerpo.html
The most memorable speeches are observations about the world at large, and remarks that unify, not observations about the speaker and his or her accomplishments and goals. To identify a speech given at a higher level, one that is not self-centered, simply count the number of times the word “I” is used vs. the number of times “we” occurs.
http://www.socializedpr.com/i-vs-we-in-presidential-rhetoric/
Read Bert Decker's succinct review here ...
http://www.bertdecker.com/experience/2009/01/the-inauguration-speech-pro-and-yes-con.html
Ian Griffin looks at it from a rhetorical standpoint. http://www.exec-comms.com/blog/2009/01/20/obama-the-lion-in-winter/
Read the speech here http://www.pivotalpublicpeaking.com/obama_inauguration.htm
Watch it here http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=PFU2opNwgZU&annotation_id=annotation_760255&feature=iv
and check out this fascinating tool Obama Inauguration Speech Word Tree http://adjix.com/kr43
By Christine Kent
Streamline the process of creating slides for your speaker
Not all of us who work in communications are blessed with a strong design sense—we’re usually good with words, and we leave the design and image creation to the experts. But communications people are eventually called on to create smart, informative and eye-catching slides for an executive presentation—usually under some insanely tight deadline.
For those times when you are pressed into the “slide jockey” role, Nancy Duarte, presentation design maven, offers some advice. Duarte says the task of creating a presentation for someone else is made tougher by the fact that executives believe they are defined by their presentation style.
