Merlin Mann has assembled an excellent set of resources on giving better presentations. He highly recommends the site Presentation Zen, which has long been on my blogroll, and touts the story-telling approach to presentations found in Beyond Bullet Points
I’ve seen only two academics take the image-rich, story-telling approach. The first presentation was very well done and I thought the images complemented the message. The other had twice as many pictures as necessary and I can’t remember a thing about the message — I just remember feeling like I was watching a stock photo slideshow.
There must be some happy medium between merely reading your paper, something you should avoid at all costs, and doing a fluffy, image-heavy slideshow, while still telling a good story.
Have you seen any examples or done it yourself? What works and what doesn’t?
6 comments ↓
I like the story telling approach as well. It fits well with a natural tendency to be more conversational — I use a lot of rhetorical questions in my talks. Also, I find animations to be useful in explaining complex relationships. As a social scientist using quantitative methods, the custom animations and images I can use in powerpoint have been very helpful in transmitting ideas over throwing up an equation from a formal model and explaining each term.
I think that’s right on, Redpeace. You also reminded me of a powerpoint presentation I saw Omar Lizardo give that used subtle animations to highlight relevant figures in tables. That kind of detail wouldn’t make or break a presentation (he was giving a job talk), but it was nice.
Oh yeah, this is advice that is probably repeated on the sites you link to (I haven’t followed them yet), but from what I’ve learned about hominid evolution/evolutionary psychology–we’re visual animals…we learn a lot from images. So, for instance, I’ll discuss different counterterrorism policies and break them out into different abstract categories, but I’ll also put up an image giving an example from each category and repeat “proactive” vs. “defensive” policies as I explain each image. The text consists of sentence fragments mostly.
I’ve never heard of images being overused, but it makes sense that you can over do it.
Thinking back on that presentation, it might not have been overuse of images so much as poor selection. Many of the images seemed to be just marginally related to the point being made.
It’s actually much hard to do the ‘photo-based’ presentation thing than people think. All too often people use pictures that don’t really support their point (even if they look nice) or they loose their way, because they haven’t got a script to focus on.
I agree, Jamin. I know a lot of people who draft their presentation in PowerPoint using bullet points and then just riff off the same slides during the talk - take away the bullet points and they’re lost.
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