IMPROVING YOUR VISUALS – Page 5 – Refuse to Be Boring

Is your medium your message?

July 18, 2011February 1, 2015Joe Pops

On a recent blog post at Duarte.com (http://tinyurl.com/3bwr4kg) it was stated that “Your slides are a visual representation of your idea and are a reflection of you.” This tweaked my interest because I had just read a similar statement in The Non-Designers Presentation Book by Robin Willliams (http://tinyurl.com/6jflvnm). In the book she said, “You are your slides. If they are sloppy and unclear, it naturally follows (in many minds) that you are sloppy and unclear, or that your information is not sound.” So at least two experts in presentation design agree – you are your slides. This makes sense to me, and goes back to Marshall McLuhan who, in 1964, coined the… Read More

Hit your pause button – the black slide

July 11, 2011February 1, 2015Joe Pops

After a presentation I gave in the Netherlands a couple of weeks ago, a colleague asked me about a (plain) black slide I had inserted in my presentation. It’s something I learned from a workshop, a book or a blog … I can’t remember exactly. The idea is that during your presentation you may want to “pause” the presentation in order to get everyone’s attention, and make a specific point. I use this pause in a variety of ways. I will tell a special story demonstrate a unique feature of one of my products involve the audience in an activity introduce the next topic in my presentation, to give it… Read More

Two simple steps

June 23, 2011February 1, 2015Joe Pops

Last week I attended a high level medical conference. Most of the presentations at the conference contained reports or information on research studies, and most of the presentations were the traditional content rich /data rich type. This can be pretty dry, but I noticed some of the presenters used simple but effective tools (in the presentation software) which helped the audience navigate through the data on the slides. You can use these tools to quickly and easily update your slides to increase the audience connection. One of the things they did was to use “builds”. You can find the technique under animations – custom animations in PowerPoint. Designing your slide… Read More