Good presentation design
This week in class I was asked to
summarize my current thoughts on good presentation design. I sat back and
thought about how I felt about presentations and I did a bit of critical
thinking. I thought about in the past what has grabbed my attention, who has
been able to teach me something through a presentation, and most important was
I remember any presentations I have been to?
After
thinking about this for quite some time I came to the conclusion that I only
remember one presentation that I have been to. It was crazy to think that I
only remember one presentation that I have been to in the past. I remember when
I was in the NAVY the military hired this public speaker to come and talk to
the base about becoming anything we want to be in life and completing our
goals. I would say that this had to be about seven years ago and I still
remembered this person’s presentation. The rest of the presentations I have
been to are all lost somewhere in my memory bank.
Recently I
was asked to watch a presentation for class by Hans Rosling, this was such a
great presentation and again I actually learned something and I still remember
what was discussed. I was so impressed because it had been so long since I had
seen or heard a memorable presentation.
I then asked myself what is so
memorable about these presentations that it has stuck to me in such a memorable
way? The answer is that these guys were amazing public speakers, they were good
at getting the message across and connecting with their audience. Sure they had
great slides and great data to go with their presentation but they knew how to
talk and engage with their audience on a personal level. The key to their success
was the design of interacting with their audience in a memorable way.
Now of
course I cannot give all of the credit to their great communication skills,
there were other key concepts which make a huge impact on good presentations. I
feel that presenting your data in an organized way is extremely important,
helping your audience understand the data and have it come alive is something
that I have seen in good presentations. Hans made his data take on what seems
like a trip through the past fifty years and give a good representation of it in
five minutes. Great visuals and simplicity made this complicated data so easy
to understand, this is particularly impressive because Hans makes this data
which could have taken months to collect easy for even a child to understand.
In this presentation there was no clutter and it was not chaotic at all to
understand.
Thinking
about these presentations always leads me back to the same thought that the
best type of presentation design might just be the simplest one. The
presentation which makes complicated things easy to understand will get the
most points in my book. As a society we tend to over complicate things perhaps
to impress others but what we must remember is that the main goal to a presentation
is to teach others.
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