Many presentation slides serve primarily as a teleprompter: the presenter, having their back turned to the audience, meanders along countless bullet points. And the audience quickly gets bored because they can read faster than the presenter can talk.
Good presentations, on the other hand, focus on the presenter and their ideas and visions. Slides help the audience grasp those ideas through memorable images and graphics (and occasionally words) – rather than distracting from them.
Nancy Duarte, founder of Duarte Design, has designed presentations for world-renowned brands such as Adobe, Cisco, Google, Hewlett-Packard, and Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth.” In “Slide:ology,” she takes you through the presentation development process, from brainstorming to designing powerful and visually appealing slides to eventually delivering the talk.
The book’s focus is on the content and design of the slides. It covers how to present insights rather than data; how to arrange elements and space them properly; how to display numbers, dimensions, and words; how to create diagrams; how to select images; how to choose colors, backgrounds, and fonts; and how to create animations and slide transitions.
The book is excellently structured and designed with great attention to detail. Numerous before-and-after case studies in all chapters help to understand the visualization strategies presented. Even without having studied graphic design, you will be able to implement many of the principles. A recommendation for anyone who wants their next presentation to stand out from the crowd of standard talks.
About the Kindle version: Do yourself a favor and buy the printed book. The many graphics have a poor resolution in the digital version and are, on top of that, black and white on the Kindle.
🎧 Suitable as an audiobook? The title is unavailable as an audiobook and would not be suitable as such.
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