Presentation Zen [30]
Actual slides. Shown here are the title slide, the “hook,” and the roadmap of the talk. The actual “hook” and background section of the obesity problem covered several slides before I introduced the roadmap/outline. (Images used in these slides from iStockphoto.com.)
Step 4
Storyboarding in Slide Sorter/Light Table view. If you have a clear sense of your structure, you can skip Step 3 and start building the flow of your presentation directly in slideware. Create a blank slide using a template of your choosing (or the simplest version of your company’s template if you must use it). I usually choose a blank slide and then place a simple text box inside it with the size and font I’ll use most often. (You can create multiple master slides in PowerPoint and Keynote.) Then I duplicate several of these slides, since they will contain the visual content of my presentation, short sentences or single words, images, quotes, charts & graphs, etc. The section slides—what presentations guru Jerry Weismann calls bumper slides—should be a different color with enough contrast that they stand out when you see them in the slide sorter view. You can have these slides hidden so that you see them only when planning in Slide Sorter view if you prefer; however, in my case, these slides will serve to give visual closure to one section and open the next section.
Now that I have a simple structure in the Slide Sorter view, I can add visuals that support my narrative. I have an introduction where I introduce the issue or “the pain” and introduce the core message. I then use the next three sections to support my assertions or “solve the pain” in a way that is interesting and informative but that never loses sight of the simple core message.
For detailed advice about creating your story using the Slide Sorter view, I recommend Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points (Microsoft Press).
Rough outline from Step Two for a presentation I created on presentation design.
The start of the storyboarding process in Step Four for the same presentation. The total number of slides used was over 150 for the talk, but here you can see the simple structure before slides were added to the appropriate sections.
Nancy Duarte
CEO of Duarte Design, the world’s leading presentation design firm. Clients include Al Gore and the biggest companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.
www.duarte.com
Nancy Duarte talks about storyboards and the process of presentation design.
Much of our communication today exhibits the quality of intangibility. Services, software, causes, thought leadership, change management, company vision—they’re often more conceptual than concrete, more ephemeral than firm. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But we regularly struggle when communicating these types of ideas because they are essentially invisible. It’s difficult to share one’s vision when there’s nothing to see. Expressing these invisible ideas visually, so that they feel tangible and actionable, is a bit of an art form, and the best place to start is not with the computer. A pencil and a sheet of paper will do nicely.
Why take this seemingly Luddite approach? Because presentation software was never intended to be a brainstorming or drawing tool. The applications are simply containers for ideas and assets, not the means to generate them. Too many of us have fallen into the trap of launching our presentation applications to prepare our content. In reality, the best creative process requires stepping away from technology and relying on the same tools of expression we grew up with—pens, pencils, crayons if you’re into hardcore regression. The goal is to generate ideas—not necessarily pictures yet—but lots of ideas. These can be words, diagrams or scenes; they can be literal or metaphorical; the only requirement is that they express your underlying thoughts. The best thing about this process is that you don’t need to figure out how to use drawing tools or where to save the file. Everything you need you already have (and