SLIDE:OLOGY

The art and presentations science of creating great

This is a book which shows in a very visual way how to do good presentations and how to innovate in this aspect. Firstly, in the introduction to the book, it shows an evolution about the Visual Aids during history. As the book says, people usually think only in presentations done by PPT and slides but during history everyone has tried to change others mind, to transmit information or tell stories even if the methods have changed. There we can see that in the year 15000 BCE, they used cave paintings as Visual Aids, then, in 3000 BCE, the Egyptians started using pictographic murals to communicate. After that, the Greeks and Romans started with the public speaking. After that, in 950 CE, before printing press, the Catholic Church started using Stained Glass Windows. This was really useful because their public was mostly illiterate and telling stories that way was a good way to stick the message. In 1350 CE, a bishop created the bar-graph. Then, in 1845, the comic strips were invented which contained both images and text. In 1945, the Overhead projector was invented and five years later, we knew about 35mm slide presentations. In 1987, The Power Point was invented and it was a huge innovation because everyone could design their own slides. After five years, the PCs started to be on all the desktops in workplaces and that evolved to digital presentations. In 2003 we discovered the Cognitive Style of PPT and in 2007 Al Gore revolutionized with his Inconvenient Truth. After this short introduction the reader knows more about the evolution of Visual Aids and can now follow the book in a better way.

SUMMARY
It can be said that this book by Nancy Duarte is a complete guide about how to do presentations. As I think it is quite well organised, I will go chapter by chapter writing what it is more important in my opinion. Each chapter has a topic and inside it it has different theories and real cases to examinate. So, I will go one by one summarising the most important things: CREATING A NEW SLIDE IDEOLOGY In this chapter, the writer talks about the new ideology of presentations. It says that in many cases, the slides are the last impression that a customer has about a company in the moment of signing a contract. According to the book, if you want to do a good presentation, you have to use the correct tool and also use it correctly. The slides have to be a service for the presenter that helps him to reinforce his message and it is used only as visual. If the slides look as a document, the audience will be concentrated in reading more that paying attention to the speaker. So, the speaker must know what is more important for him, to be listened or the slides to be read? Nancy also facilitates us the Presentation Ecosystem. There we can see three main important things as Message, Visual Story and Delivery that are the most important things to take into account in a presentation. Regarding to the message we have to be aware of the audience, we have to do an ideation of it, then write something (a story) and also critique. For the Visual Story we have four steps to follow also, visual thinking, graphic design, motion Design and critique. Finally, in the delivery we should take into acount the human factor, the web or devices, the paper and also critique. This ecosystem is something that we should have when preparing a presentation. Then, we have the time we should invest in developing the presentation; that is between 36-90 hours. Also, Nancy gives seven questions to get to know the audience youll have: What are they like?, Why are they here?, What keeps them up at night?, How can you solve their problem?, What do you want them to do?, How might they resist? And How can you best reach them? For that she tells that it is interesting to download an audience persona slide.

CREATING IDEAS, NOT SLIDES In this chapter, Nancy writes about the ideas we have to put in the presentations. The first important thing is to find the inspiration somewhere, when someone needs to be creative its good that he changes his environment. Also she says that even if sometimes we have ideas very

quickly, we mustnt stop there, they could be good but we should force ourselves to think on more ideas. A good method to organise ideas are the sticky notes as it is said in the book. With them, we can capture the ideas and write them in a short way, we can mix the and the put them in groups as we want. For these brainstormings, there are five rules that we should follow: - Postpone the judgements of all the ideas. - Encourage and support wild and exagerated ideas. - Take care of the quantity and not of the quality. -Create ideas on what others have thought. - Treat every idea equaly. Finally, we should sketch our ideas in different ways. CREATING DIAGRAMS This chapter talks about diagrams, and gives exmples of the most common ones. It says that diagrams can be connected with each other to explain complex concepts. They are very useful to explaing how something is working or where something is. There are some examples in the book that help us to understand what that means.

DISPLAYING DATA We could explain this chapter shortly, the thing is that in some presentations we need to include some data. For that we should follow the five principles. That is, we have to tell the truth to our audience, we must get to the pint, we should pick the right tool for the job, we have to highlight or remark what its important and we have to do everything simple. THINKING LIKE A DESIGNER This chapter is about the importance of the design. A company will reveal lots of things through the design it choses for its presentations so the design will be related to the company or the brand. For doing that in a good way we have to take into account the arrengement, visual elements and movement. These three ideas are developed in the following chapters.

ARRANGING ELEMENTS This is one of the most important chapters to take into account. The way you arrange the elements in a slide gives meaning to the things you are saying. Depending on how you arrange this elements you will provoke different feelings in the audience. For arranging them correctly, we have to be aware of the contrast so that the audience can identify what it is really important. We should be aware that the presentation flows so that the audience can process the information in a good order. The hierarchy and unity are also important factors to control because it shows the relationship between different elements. Finally we should take into account the proximity and also the whitespace. USING VISUAL ELEMENTS: BACKGROUND, COLOR and TEXT This chapter gives tips about how to manage these three elements in a presentation. It is an interesting chapter but it is maybe the one that I knew more because I have been analyzing this elements before. So, Nancy talks here about how do we have to chose the colors depending on the audience. What does each text type mean and how should the background be in the slides. The next chapters talk about the images, the movement and interaction with the slides. Finally, we have the manifesto where Nancy gives the five theses for a presentation to be powerful. This is one of the things Ive liked more in the book and I think it is a good way to summarize and finish the book. Treat your Audience as King Spread Ideas and Move People Help them See What Youre Saying Practice Design, Not Decoration Cultivate Healthy Relationships

PERSONAL REFLECTION
In my opinion, this is a really good book and more for us that now we are starting in LEINN and sometimes we are a bit lost when we have to do an important presentation. I think that usually we dont give the presentation the importance it has. I mean, when we are working on a project that we should present to someone, we usually put a lot of effort in doing the work, developing the project in every aspect and detail. But I think we have a really big mistake, that we leave the presentation for the last moment without caring a lot and

we dont realize that the presentation is what the customer will see, the only moment that the customer will be in contact with us. We arent used to prepare the presentations in advance and it is something we leave for the last moment. After reading this book, I have realised that of course it is very important to develop the project but as important as that is to develop the presentation. There are lots of aspects of the presentation that I didnt even know that we should take them into account. I think that from now on, we should invest more time in developing the presentation in order to get closer to the customer. For this reason, I think that this kind of things should be teached in the schools because when we are children we take some habits of how to do presentations and then it is quite dificult to change those habits into new ones. I think that there are many important things in this book and for sure I will check this essay whenever we have an important presentation. But one of the things that I will be more aware the next time is the audience. I think that we hardly get to know our audience and we dont make an effort to know who is listening to us. I think thats very important and in the book we have many tips that can help us to do that well. I have realised that this is very important in some presentations that we have alread done for a cusomer that told us that we should have known more about him, in which language he wanted the presentation, what situation he livesThis will have improved the proximity to him in the presentation. Another example is that last week a team from MTA had to do a presentation to a company and before starting a member of the group told that this company was from Grupo Mondragon, and it wasnt. This is a huge mistake and cant happen because the customer wont see you as well as in the start anymore. Another important thing that I have discovered in this book is the presentation ecosystem. I think that it is a very important tool and that can be really useful to develop a presentation. In fact, I think that we will use it in Smash for the next presentations we have. It shows the steps we have to be aware of and also it gives kind of steps to follow in order to do all that in a correct way. Also I must say that the fact of having real cases and examples in each chapter helps a lot to understand the theory that Nancy Duarte shares with the reader. And I also think that the sentences that are remarked in the book are really good because they summarize more or less what Nancy says in the theory. I think that in our team we will take lot of advantage of this book because it is quite concrete and it has different steps and things we can do easily. That has been one of the things Ive liked more about this book, that it is not an abstract book, it gives concrete things to use in order to do good presentations. To start, next week we have a presentation and I think that we will use this book to prepare it.

Finally, I would like to say that I would like to read also Presentacion Zen, a book by Garr Reynolds because Nancy mentions this book several times in Slide:Ology and for sure it will be a really good book on this. Summing up, I want to say that the sentence in the first pages of the book summarises quite well everything. It is an originaal sentence by Abraham Lincoln but they have transformed a little bit. Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man character, give him powerpoint. This summarises the book because I think that every decision you make in the slides and presentations defines really well how the speaker or the company is.