slide:ology | creating great presentations

This is not the typical book that I review in this blog. Slide:ology is not about travel, but it's a book that will be of interest to anyone who has to make presentations. I expect a lot of you have to do that in your professional lives. Software such as PowerPoint (Microsoft) and Keynote (Apple) has made it easy to put together audio-visual presentation. That being said, it is a real challenge to create effective presentations.

Prior to the Renaissance, much communication was visually based. Books were handwritten and thus rare and expensive. Not many people even knew how to read. Remember that the Church used media like stained glass windows to teach Bible stories. Johannes Gutenberg changed all that. The invention of movable type in 1439 initiated a major shift in communication technology. As more and more people learned to read and write, as pamphlets and books became plentiful, communication shifted from the visual to the verbal.

Now with the innovation of the personal computer, our culture is becoming increasingly visual. Next time you surf the web, notice the websites and blogs that get your attention: they have visual WOW. While millions of websites offer useful information, the ones that actually get read are designed by people who know how to communicate graphically.

The same thing is true with visual presentations. You may have an important message to convey, but unless you can convey it visually, your message will not get heard. Slide:ology | The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations is a manual intended to help professionals create effective presentations using presentation software. Nancy Duarte has brought together an incredible body of material and has addressed the creative challenge of how to communicate visually.

This would be a great textbook in a college or adult education setting. There are chapters on visual design, the use of color, typography, graphics, and much more. Readers with a background in art history or graphic design will be much better equipped to work their way through this book. There is a learning curve involved in appropriating this content. You won't be able to pick up the book on Saturday afternoon and have a great presentation ready to give on Monday morning. The essential message of slide:ology is that we must develop a new communications paradigm: we need to learn to think and communicate visually.


copyright (c) 2008 by David J. Ourisman. All rights reserved. If you have comments on this column, or questions about booking travel, email me or visit my website.
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