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

“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 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

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

Let’s be honest. PowerPoint presentations are often boring, and nearly always ugly. As an art director with an inexplicable interest in presentations, I often tell people that the two biggest things you can do to improve your presentation is to simplify your story, and use a better gr

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

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