Presentations

Some info on presentations, Web style.

First, best-practices. This article by Garr Reynolds (on his blog Presentation Zen): The Lessig Method, talks about the so-called Lessig method of presentation. In short, Professor Lessig simply uses a few words (sometimes just one), or a photo, or a short quote in each slide. This method is similar to the Takahashi Method.

I’ll paste here two links found in the article: The first is Dick Hardt‘s 15-minute presentation (with a hundred-or-so slides) regarding a compelling topic: Identity 2.0 and the concept of digital identity. The second is Lawrence Lessig’s Flash presentation on his favorite theme: free culture. From both there’s a lot to learn on both style, content, presentation and the relatinship among them.

Then, in his post Stop your presentation before it kills again!, Kathy Sierra (in the blog Creating Passionate Users) cites the wonderful short article by Tufte in this Wired article (…Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely), and in more detail in his book, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.

So, to help us avoid the redundancy and too-animated features of PowerPoint, and to journey back to the art of a simple presentation (viewable both in a browser and full-screen with minimal effort), I have a few Websites to recommend {I haven’t tested them thoroughly).

Zoho Show (allows to import PowerPoint) and Thumbstack are similar services, both simple and allowing the design of nice slideshows. S5 is a presentation builder based on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The most complex and feature-rich is however Empressr, with the ability to design on-line a fully-featured presentation, incorporating video, sound and animation.

Last, if anyone intendes to use a slideshow to present a business plan, this post from Guy Kawasaki’s blog, The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint, is nice reading.

About Antonio Vantaggiato

Professor, web2.0 enthusiast, and didactic chef.
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