Last Monday, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) invited Duarte, a design firm in the Bay Area, to train us on how to make better presentations. The training session took an entire workday, but it was an eye-opening experience to learn brainstorming techniques, visualizing techniques, and how to help the audience understand your thoughts and messages.
Takeaways
- Take the risk, lose the fear
Watch Sir Ken Robinson’s TEDTalk on creativity - Avoid teleprompter slides
I tend to create “teleprompter” slides, which is a slide that has about 50 words. A long bulleted list slide can be considered a “teleprompter” slide. They’re easy to make, but these slides are more for you, the presenter, rather than the audience. - Presentations are glance media
Since the audience looks at slides rapidly and process them immediately, the presenter needs to ensure that the slides don’t have a lot of noise—too many images, excessive animation, and random transitions—and have a clear signal or focus point. - Be audience empathetic
Understand your audience’s problem, spend more time on how you can help your audience. Focus on the WHY (why should your audience care?).
Powerpoint tip: If you are using Microsoft’s Powerpoint, you can use the selection pane to reorder the layers in your slide. This feature is similar to the layers panel in Photoshop.
marisa muses 