Slide:ology – Presentation Made Perfect
Less than thirty pages through Slide:ology, I realized that, “I’ve seen this before!” Some of the best ideas in Slide:ology are also in Michael Gelb’s bestseller back in 2000, “How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci.”
The really great ideas are timeless!
If Leonardo was living today, he’d be doing presentations using the concepts in Slide:ology and five hundred years from now, they would still revere his genius.
Slide:ology is a beautiful book. You can almost feel the craftsmanship as you journey through the pages. I’m torn by the impulses of both envy and the desire to learn as Duarte Design’s Nancy Duarte makes the art of communication seem so effortless and obvious. I know that opening my veins onto that podium would be easier than the effort I’ve put into some of my own presentations. For those of us who are no strangers to auditoriums and conference rooms, Slide:ology is like a Fabergé egg; a Stradivarius violin.
It is a work of art, but it’s also clearly a ‘how to’ book. Duarte takes the puzzle of presentations apart into twelve components. If you don’t know what is keeping your presentations from being their best, you can read the early chapters, “Creating a New Slide Ideology” and “Creating Ideas, Not Slides” for ideas and inspiration. In Duarte’s world, presentations are clearly a team activity and Duarte shows you how to mine your team members for their best ideas and get to the core of what needs to be understood. If you need help in solving a more specific problem, chapters like “Creating Diagrams” and “Displaying Data” are not just inspiring, they’re an encyclopedia of the ways that work to do these things. And throughout, Duarte does more than just tell you how to do it, she shows you with pages that are sometimes more illustration than they are text.
One of the myths shattered by Slide:ology is that presentations are a technical skill. In fact, and very much in common with Leonardo, hand drawn sketches illustrate key points more than computer drawn images. In fact, computer technology is the one thing totally missing. You won’t find anything at all about how to create a template in PowerPoint. What you will find is when a template works, when it doesn’t, what is in it, and why you should use one in the first place. Anyone who has actually created a PowerPoint presentation knows that the ‘back office’ effort is considerable. (It must have been huge to produce Slide:ology!) But technology is just the framework that supports a great presentation. You can’t create one without both the design the comes before it and the execution that comes after.
It’s those first and last steps that make Slide:ology one for the ages.
Slide:ology
Nancy Duarte
274 pages, paperback
$34.99
November, 2008 O’Reilly Media
http://www.slideology.com
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596522346/
ISBN: 978-0-596-52234-6
