TED Blog: Aaron Weyenberg is the master of slide decks. Our UX Lead creates Keynote presentations that are both slick and charming—the kind that pull you in and keep you captivated, but in an understated way that helps you focus on what’s actually being said. He does this for his own presentations and for lots of other folks in the office. Yes, his coworkers ask him to design their slides, because he’s just that good.
2 comments:
I have heard so many different opinions on slide decks (a term I just learned). People say keep them really simple, some say only write a heading, some say write key points, some even say include as much as you can. The one thing everyone seems to agree with is to keep in clear. I love the slides shown in this article, there are really crisp and clean designs accompanied with fitting pictures. I love the slides but they look more like posters than slides. I am not saying that is wrong, simply that this may not always be the best choice. Everything depends. If you are giving a corporate presentation, fun pictures may be a risk, if you are delivering a lecture, pictures may be a distraction, but for a TED talk or a presentation of a similar style, a fun picture like displayed here may be a great idea. So there are a lot of ways to do a slide show and I think there are a few wrong ways. I think a list of do not-s is more usefully than a list of do-s.
This article has a lot of good advice, but nothing seems all that new or impressive. Mostly, it is just basic information with a couple of advanced tricks. Keeping text off slides, having uniformity in your presentation, and transitions are all things that one would learn in any basic computer class that included creating slide presentations. The only thing that I didn’t know was the tip about panning large images. It seems like a great feature to use for displaying websites, or any large image – like the groundplan for the scene shop layout presentations for TD1. On one hand, I am surprised that TED doesn’t have more advanced topics and tricks in this article. On the other hand, creating a good, effective presentation doesn’t take a lot of fancy tricks. It requires careful planning, following a few simple rules, knowing your presentation and what you want to say, and actually saying it.
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