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

When I was a kid my father went back to school for his MBA. (For a while I thought everyone was saying “NBA,” but then I realized that he’s actually not so tall and couldn’t secretly be a professional basketball player.) Anyway, after his classes he would come home and try to explain

I sometimes think my co-workers think I’m crazy. I try hard to make presentations look like anything but presentations. Or, more to the point, not look like typical, ugly presentations. It’s an uphill battle – some people don’t see the point in the process, though generally most peopl

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

I have heard lots of theories about how many words (ideally) should be on a slide. It seems to me that the question isn’t entirely the point. There are different types of slide presentations, and different “rules” for each. Beyond that, the expectations of the audience and the n

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