Death By Powerpoint
Posted by: Rowan in Personal Blog, tags: Apple, Design, Futuresonic, Keynote, Microsoft, powerpoint, presentation
I’ve just spent the day at Futuresonic, the Urban Festival of Art, Music & Ideas in Manchester. The talks I saw ranged from the unintelligible to the inspiring, but on the whole it was an enjoyable day. I was particularly impressed by Aaron Koblain’s talk on data visualisation. I shan’t relay what he said, but instead will simply suggest you check out some of his amazing work at his website.
What the day also got me thinking about however was the quality of presentations. Every presenter I saw today used some sort of computer presentation, all run on the venue’s Macs running Apple’s Keynote software. However it was clear to see which presenters had written their presentations in Keynote and which had put them together using Microsoft Powerpoint. Reason 1 was that Keynote’s ability to import Powerpoint files isn’t quite perfect, making for some slightly oddly aligned fonts. Reason 2 was that I recognise some of the templates provided by both pieces of software. But reason 3 was that the presentations run on Keynote were – without exception – quite simply better than the Powerpoint ones. I couldn’t help but wonder why – both pieces of software offer similar functionality, so why would users of one program produce better presentations than users of the other?
What do I mean by “better”, for a start? I tweeted my thoughts that Keynote presentations were better than Powerpoint ones, and one of my colleagues replied, “Keynote gives you better starting points, (having used it), which helps people learn how to do better”. He’s probably right, I would certainly agree that the backgrounds, fonts and layouts in Keynote’s presentations are on the whole more stylish than those provided by Powerpoint. Keynote’s font rendering, gradients, shadows and other effects are also generally smoother. But I think there’s more to it than that…
Powerpoint has got something of a bad reputation in recent years, but it’s not that using a Powerpoint presentation is necessarily a bad thing, it’s that you need to use them appropriately. Slides should include graphics, photos and other visual elements, plus possibly some quotes, numbers, or short pieces of salient information. They should not include large blocks of text, they should rarely include bullet points, and they should never contain a transcript of what the presenter intends to say. They are an aide to the speaker, a way to enhance the presentation, not the core of it. They should rarely include background images and should always place legibility ahead of fanciness. And pointless elements like large headers/footers or random coloured sidebars or irrelevant graphical elements just get in the way of your content. At Futuresonic, the Keynote presenters stuck to these sorts of rules, whereas the Powerpoint guys didn’t. Why would that be? Perhaps the slide templates in Keynote have less elements on them and shorter blocks of larger text, but I’m not sure whether that’s particularly the case. And certainly either software will enable you to create both great and horrific presentations. I rather like the cartoon to the left, which tells us a lot.
So perhaps it’s down to experience and influence. Would it be churlish of me to suggest that His Steveness might have something to do with it? Perhaps… just perhaps, the Keynote users (as Mac users by definition) have watched one or more of Steve Jobs’ presentations at Macworld or other events. He is, after all, a superb presenter. And just look at some examples of his slides: (Photos from TechShowNetwork)
So who knows. But personally, I’ll be sticking with Keynote, and doing my best to write good presentations.
Hi Rowan,
The problem with many presentations is they tend to follow the defaults given by the presentation tool. Specifically with powerpoint this tends to mean bullet point after bullet point – with the bullet points often relied upon as an aide memoire for those doing the talking. Personally I think if you’re going to do that, just point the slides at yourself, and talk, and the audience will have a better time.
Keynote tends to reduce this affect in 2 ways: Firstly it’s default templates don’t tend to encourage overuse of bullet points. They can be useful when used carefully, but are often over used – also the default templates in keynote are easier and more easy to switch between, and also, frankly, look prettier.The other point though is that keynote makes it natural to put slides out on the external display AND leave speaker notes visible (simply, without pain – due to the software being made by the same person who makes the locked down hardware/OS) for the speaker to be able to see. As a result, they don’t need a visible crutch, and can just focus on the key points.
If you’re really after writing good presentations, the best way IMO is to ditch all the templates and look at good presentations and initially follow their lead and then go their own way. One good example is the “lessig style” – which sounds horrendous. I’ve done one presentation (3 or 4 times now) lessig style, and whilst it sounds mad – 150 slides in 15 minutes – once you realise what it’s doing it works well. (It’s basically subtitles only leaving in the key words – slides – http://tinyurl.com/3c2xz6 vs transcript – http://tinyurl.com/yd4j2y) In fact what it’s doing is more like what news presenters do, and essentially adding emphasis to what you’re saying. You do really need to know what you’re saying in such a talk though. The cool thing about lessig style is that it’s very good for giving out *a lot* of information in a short time. (much like the news)
The point about good slides making a good comic is very valid. Personally I export my slides as a PDF then convert it to pngs (640×480), then pull those into tables (8-10 to a page) and then print that out as my read through. If it makes sense as a comic, it’ll probably make sense as a presentation. The interesting thing there is you can still pack alot in, without necessarily overloading people. Two recentish versions I’ve done like that are here:
http://yeoldeclue.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.cgi?rm=viewpost&nodeid=1235690128
and here:
http://yeoldeclue.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.cgi?rm=viewpost&nodeid=1223342651
The latter was actually intended to be a “read to yourself” presentation rather than something I’ve actually presented – which makes it very comic book like.
Personally, regarding presentations these days, I look to good documentaries, television news, comics and graphic novels for inspiration, but lots of http://www.slideshare.net is a good source of inspiration. Sometimes having lots of text can be a good idea if you’re talking *about* that text, but not reading that text. ( “as you can see from this… …” )
At the end of the day though, my only real advice is this – find a style you like, and if you have templates that support it, great, but if you don’t, throw them away and make your own and if you can, share them on slideshare – its a neat way of getting feedback
(http://www.slideshare.net/kamaelian/slideshows)
Incidentally, none of the presentations on that page were made using powerpoint, and only 3 were made using keynote…
Michael