Low-Fat Presentations

Presenting may be an art, but presenting without boring the audience is actually easy.
There's a lot of blogs, books and opinions about the subject, but the main idea is the triplet: message, focus and design.

The message is easy: it's what one needs to communicate to the audience.
This main principle is to open your presentation with the conclusion, i.e., show what the audience will see next. Then show how to get to conclusion, or how did one got into that conclusion.

Focus is an exercise that must be performed at each presentation step.
For each step one must ask the question "is there anything that I can remove?" This will maintain the presentation focused on the message, so that no unnecessary "fat" will be included.

Contrary to the common believe, design is not hard to achieve.
Start by using a clean and professional good looking template and keep things simple. Don't stuff loads of text that no one will read nor retain. Pick a good font that is easily read when projected, take into account the fact that size does matter and people on the back of the audience need to see it clearly.
Use graphics, workflows, etc. whenever possible, it usually is more eye appealing and much less boring than it's similar text description. Please use good looking graphics, picking from clipart that's bundled with office suits and alike is usually a bad choice, since it's looks usually very outdated.
Finally, be consistent by using the same lettering, colors, etc..


Here's a set o articles which I recommend:
  1. How to Present to Senior Executives
  2. Create a Presentation Your Audience Will Care About
  3. Do Your Slides Pass the Glance Test
  4. Structure Your Presentation Like a Story
./M6