4 famous books on Presentations
I have just finished a book review on Garr Reynold’s inspirational Presentation Zen. I summarize a few of the key ideas in the book and offer some links to online presentations at Slideshare and Ted Talks.
Presentations have fascinated me for the last year, coinciding with my early video experiments, one of the first of which was a video resume based on a PowerPoint presentation I uploaded to LinkedIn. Presentations, when combined with an interesting speaker and interesting topic, are a great learning experience. Too often though, we associate presentations with some dull training or business information session. It shouldn’t have to be this way.
In the world of education, the concept of “digital storytelling” has been a buzz concept for the last few years. More than ever, regular people have access to tools for telling their stories and sharing their ideas digitally. One of the problems with this of course, is the great output of mediocre or uninspiring video and other multimedia. I think a crash course is necessary, to teach a few design basics to anyone thinking about putting together a presentation or video.
In my expansive book review of Presentation Zen you’ll find some design principles I followed when creating presentations and a number of examples I borrowed from Reynold’s book. These days with tools like Photoshop Elements (a light version) being affordable and accessible, there is really no excuse for anyone to churn out a template-based “presentation by numbers” production. Interesting photos can be found at stock photo sites or through creative commons licensing. A world of resources is available to give your presentations some graphical pizazz.
Read the review of Presentation Zen and check out some links to amazing presentations
http://iam.strongandfree.ca/book-reviews/presentation-zen
