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

Those that I work with know my general feelings about capabilities presentations. We wind up doing them a lot in advertising, and while I wouldn’t say they are a waste of time, I often feel they should be done with a different focus and objective. For those that don’t know, a ca

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

Recently, I’ve had several people mention a quote from Steve Jobs to me. “People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.” I think he makes an excellent point, though not exactly what the people mentioning it to me may have thought he was making. It

More and more, people are seeing the beauty in a widescreen presentation. If you’re presenting on a plasma or LCD TV, it makes perfect sense. But even projected, a widescreen presentation can really sing. How do you set it up? First you have to determine the resolution of whatev