Presentation Design

One of my classes this quarter is Sustainable Marketing, a fascinating course that explores ecological design, corporate social responsibility, and personal “green” practices. While the class is primarily composed of marketing majors, the instructor opened the course to industrial design majors as well. One of them is in my group, and he has added his own design influence, creating an interesting dynamic within the group.

The three ID majors in our class gave a presentation the other day about a workshop they attended, led by the famed designer Edward Tufte. The point of his workshop was to develop better design for presentations, and avoid the infamous “death by powerpoint” situation.

Some of Edward’s ideas make a lot of sense. The idea of simplifying PowerPoint down, or simply not using it at all in favor of handouts and one “super graphic” is an unconventional idea in the business world;  long, boring, bullet-point and pie chart ridden PowerPoint presentations seem to be the accepted standard. I really like the idea of handouts, I plan to use them in my next presentation. I have been progressively simplifying my PowerPoint presentations for the past year: avoiding bullet points wherever possible, and telling a visual story  rather than just reading bullet points out loud ( I took a page out of Seth Godin’s book along with Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen)

The handouts just take it one step further: allowing me focus on the big ideas while relaying all the details in a bite sized document personalized for the audience.

The takeaway here is “why should a presentation have to be boring?”