I’ve recently spoken at two events that outright rejected the use of PowerPoint. They claimed it reduced participation, increased presentation times, and bored people. I’m sorry, but the use of effective visuals can increase comprehension, improve retention, keep a presentation on track, and further the level of engagement. Outlawing PowerPoint is like avoiding the roads because some people get in accidents.

Good Presentations Kick Butt

Even the biggest haters can recall experiences where presentations really drove a point home. Maybe it was Al Gore’s presentation from An Inconvenient Truth or nearly anything delivered at the TED Conference. Perhaps it lacked serious production value but really added to a speech. The point is—good stuff is out there.

Here are two popular and compelling presentations from SlideShare:

Good Visuals Don’t Make A Speech, They Complement A Speaker

Visuals should reinforce a speech, they need not and should not serve as reference material. If the slide deck offers everything that the speaker will say then the speaker should stay home and send off the slides. It’s entirely acceptable for slides to make no sense whatsoever without the speaker.

If you want to provide reference material then provide it. But only in very specific training circumstances should the slides be that reference.

How To Present More Effectively

I was once of the “Headers and Bullets” school. But a few people changed my tune. They taught me to reinforce my points with compelling imagery, to use far fewer words, to be subtle with animation, and to tell stories. Those people were:

• Cliff Atkinson, who wrote Beyond Bullet Points. I’d highly recommend either this interview with him or checking out a free webinar called “How to Create a 15-Minute Presentation (with Graphics!) in One Hour”
• Craig Ball, who is perhaps the best known speaker on the topics of PowerPoint and electronic evidence in the courtroom
• Kathy Sierra, who has always been an incredible role model in all things to do with presenting information. On her blog she discussed when to use PowerPoint and how to incorporate graphics into presentations

A Few Tips To Get Started

The folks above have much experience than I do, but here are a few quick tips to walk away with:

• Keep fonts 18pt or larger (so people can read them)
• Avoid sentences when possible. Avoid paragraphs 99% of the time
• If you don’t know a lot about animation or transitions, don’t bother with them–it’ll do more harm than good (no one will notice it missing, but everyone will notice if you’re trying out “fancy new stuff”)
• Avoid clipart. Try Flickr or iStockPhoto
• Use full screen images to drive points home

My Advice

If you’re managing an event, seriously discuss the use of visuals with speakers. If they avoid too many bullets and rehearse then the visuals will add a powerful dimension to their presentation. Whatever you do, don’t blindly reject PowerPoint.

If you present regularly, visit the references above (as well as Presentation Zen) for insight into professional and compelling presentation design. (Oh, and my company designs PowerPoint templates. Go figure…)

Effective presentations are powerful. Do you have any advice or resources to to add?

(RSS/email readers, click here to see the design!)

Note: The ‘we’ I’m referring to is my team at SET Consulting.  A big thank you to Keith for the design and David for the development.  While we were inspired by many other blog designs, this theme was created from scratch (i.e., all modifications to the well-structured default WordPress theme).

New Purpose

The first change has nothing to do with the design.  I’ve simplified the purpose of the site to “You want to be happy and productive. With a slant toward technology, I try to help with that here.”  I’ll still occasionally cover DC technology and often discuss social media…but the core focus has been refined.

Organization Of Information

The main purpose of the redesign was to organize our information in a more relevant manner.  We hope you’ll check out the “best of TECHNOTHEORY” and other sidebar elements.  I want to keep you aware of what I’m up to without overwhelming you with too much stuff—we hope this improves your experience.

Consistency Between Websites

Now all three of our websites use a similar color palette, and are tied together with the tabbed bar at the very top of this page.  While there are improvements ahead for all sites, we think this will help you to find a consistent (and maybe someday recognizable) brand.

Quick Thank You’s

While there were many sites we looked to for examples there are a few I want to mention:

• I love WordPress.  It’s amazing what open-source software can do
• Keith suggested making the first paragraph slightly more prominent based on a site he frequents, farfromfearless.  Here’s an example there
• A big fan of Chris Brogan, that’s where I got the idea for the shaded face picture

Surprise: We Designed This In PowerPoint And Word

What you most likely wouldn’t guess is that this entire site was designed in PowerPoint and Word.  We used PowerPoint for all the layout and graphics, especially in the sidebar.  We used Word for the typography in each blog post.  No, we didn’t export any code from Office—that was all done by hand in HTML, CSS, PHP, or SQL.

So you probably think we’re crazy?  Well, we consider ourselves to be some of the best PowerPoint, Word, and Excel designers and developers.  So we wanted to practice what we preach.  After all, our Microsoft Office design business has been on fire lately, with projects for Fannie Mae, NTT America, NIST, and other recognizable brands.

Do you want to know more about this?  Let me know in the comments and maybe I’ll dedicate a post to the topic of Office design…

Any Thoughts, Compatibility Issues, or Suggestions?

We’re very proud of this site but have some changes in store.  If we weren’t so busy with other work we’d fix up the display of posts within categories and I’d add much more to the Lijit search functionality.  But that’s not all that’s on the wish list.

Is there anything you’d like to see?  Are you having any display issues?

Regularly I’ll toss my Dell M1210 into a Waterfield sleeve case with an extra battery and a book. That’ll get me 8 hours for 6 lbs (or 4lbs before the other stuff) with more power than the MacBook Air. Tack on my Motorola Q with an extra battery and I have unlimited free internet if I can’t find a hotspot. What more would I need? (oh, I’ll bring my 1st generation iPod Nano along, too.)

But that’s not really doing my comparison justice. With the MacBook Air I can’t bring along DVDs for a planeride (plus I have two headphones jacks on my Dell). The very thin keyboard, like the iPhone’s missing keyboard, is an adjustment that I wouldn’t look forward to. And the pricetag isn’t exactly forgiving.

I love Apple’s design (especially that of the MacBook Air), and I wish other companies could be half as innovative. Apple’s smart in at least three ways:

1. They produce devices people want to touch and interact with
2. They incorporate hardware that’s superior to what many people would buy on their own ($400 laptop? you’ll get what you pay for)
3. They make things simple to use

Attractive, fast, and easy are the formula for selling, but the latter two qualities are far more important than attractiveness for productivity. I think we often get caught up in the way things look (I know I can be a design snob), but whether or not one buys some of these newer tools shouldn’t just be about the look. It should be about the hours that it’ll save you or the conveniences it’ll afford (like willingness to take a laptop somewhere you wouldn’t otherwise). That’s just my $.02 as I struggle to resist another purchase with so much appeal.

While we regularly work with talented web designers and developers, this was a completely home-brewed effort. No, we’re not planning to offer web design or development as a service to our clients…but we have realized two things:

• (When you have the talent,) a “do-it-yourself” effort for something so important to the company feels incredibly rewarding
• Occasional challenges with coding are worth overcoming when both our work on AwayFind and Office projects often have web components

Deep thank yous go especially to Keith (the design), David (the code), and Kate (the tireless proofreading — here’s her blog) for bringing this to fruition. And, of course, thank you to the wonderful clients who allowed us to create case studies for our portfolio:

• American Bank
• Chevy Chase Bank
• CMD Outsourcing Solutions
• e.magination
• Employee One
• Jacoby
• Miles & Stockbridge P.C.
• NTT America
• NIST
• SAE International
• American Association for Justice (not yet online)
• First Potomac Realty Trust (not yet online)
• Shapiro Sher Guinot & Sandler (not yet online)
• Young & Thompson (not yet online)

Soon I’ll return to the regular scheduled productivity tips…but I wanted to share something that’s been so important to me and my team. We hope you enjoy the design and information…and thanks for reading this announcement : ).

For just over a year I’ve been lucky enough to have an incredible graphic designer working with me, and that’s led our company to be solicited as much for design as for development and training. Quite frequently we’re asked to “give a facelift” to some Excel report, PowerPoint template, or Word proposal. But while aesthetics may be what they’d like at the end of the day, there are a number of steps to getting there. Giving the client what they want in a design requires helping them to understand what they really need.

Let’s take an Excel project we’ve recently completed. The client sought to illustrate to their prospects the advantages and disadvantages of various employee benefits packages. Their existing report creation process was as follows:

1. Take data from a number of places and paste it into various cells and formulas throughout an existing Excel workbook
2. Edit a few formulas to address some of the variations in this new set of data
3. Edit the source range of the Excel charts and graphs to the newly pasted data so as to fit it within an appropriate range
4. Reposition the graphs as Excel often moved them around in the process of updating
5. Print or email the reports to clients

The existing process required deep knowledge of what the input data meant, of how Excel formulas worked, of how the final design should look, and of how a mistake in the reports might appear (manual processes like these rarely work on the first try). In short, it required a lot of expertise and a few hours worth of time.

Could we improve the attractiveness of their reports? Sure. Would that design hold up as their data shifted? Not so fast… If we stuck with their existing process, we’d essentially be relying not only on the analytic and industry-specific skills they already needed, but on a deeper understanding of design. The last thing I want is to make my clients lives more difficult–because that would ensure that our efforts were unlikely to be used (or used well).

So we did what we had to do: we spent many hours understanding the possible permutations of input data and output reports. We then created a userform that took all the input data, and developed a series of reports on separate worksheets. When all was said and done, the clients process became:

1. Take data from a number of places and paste it into cells that are clearly labeled
2. Print or email the reports to clients

No longer was Excel knowledge or industry-expertise required. And, of course, the reports were attractive and have already begun winning them more business (after all, they can now use them with all their prospects instead of just the bigger deals).

But this isn’t meant to be a case study of my business. It’s to illustrate that many of the smallest design challenges (a small Excel spreadsheet project) are not just about printing something once but about the life of the design–a life where elements change and the people who touch it aren’t necessarily brilliant designers or industry experts.

If someone thinks the half-dozen hours it may take to choose colors, fonts, and layout are all a design process involves, then they’re sorely mistaken. As soon as someone is going to touch a design, it now becomes a question of how to architect the design.

Once upon a time a designer’s role was to paint the door. Now we’re asked to prevent the door from being too heavy and not to bang into the wall. Even the smallest projects require time and thought that are not just about the basic colors, fonts, and layout. In the coming years I hope that more businesspeople will begin to understand, respect, and value that.