Most ADs don’t work on a lot of presentations – probably because they don’t want to. Some people would rather hide under their desk than deal with presented materials. I realize that I’m weird. I actually like presentations. I think it has something to do with creative restricti

The other day I bumped into a colleague I had worked with at another agency. We got to talking about the first project we partnered on.  It was a slide presentation – a really bad one, as I recall, and I kind of put my foot in my mouth. I remember it clearly. We were looking at the sl

“What’s the big idea?” Surprisingly, people don’t get offended when I ask this question, and I ask it all the time. I guess it’s clear in context that I’m not upset when I ask it. Because the big idea is really important. It’s probably easier

I talk a lot about making things audience-centric, which is really just thinking about your audience, and giving them the information that’s relevant to them. And I often preach a message of simplicity (I probably sound like a broken record!) But part of making your presentation audie

Today I want to talk about hierarchy in design. Hierarchy in design is the decision you make about what’s most important on the page and giving it the most weight. It’s about deciding what matters to your audience and what doesn’t. When you know what’s important, it’s easy to ma

Picture the scene: a presenter standing in front of their audience, reading from a list of bullets on the screen. Even if the audience was interested initially, they’re tuning the presenter out before long. The most frequent critique of this approach to presenting is to point out that

Here’s an equation I spout all the time: A complicated idea + Design = A better looking complicated idea. The key to better slides is to look first at the story. Once the story works, the slides design themselves. Here’s a quick case study with lots of screen grabs. First

Designing a presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote is an exercise in swimming upstream. The first thing the program gives you is a title and a page of bullets. Bullets are often the wrong tool for the job, and if your content is well thought out, do you even need a title? I was having