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Presentation Zen

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

🎨 Impressions

It is actually one of the better books on presentation.

Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity.

✍️ My Top Quotes

  • “The first principle of the art is not to rely on tricks of technique. Most swordsmen make too much of technique, sometimes making it their chief concern.”

  • PowerPoint 1.0 was created in Silicon Valley in 1987 by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin as a way to display presentations on a Mac. It was cool. And it worked. They sold the application later that year to Microsoft.

  • According to John Sweller, who developed the cognitive load theory in the 1980s, it is more difficult to process information if it is coming at us both verbally and in written form at the same time.

  • Since people cannot read and listen well at the same time, displays filled with lots of text must be avoided. On the other hand, multimedia that displays visual information, including visualizations of quantitative information, can be processed while listening to someone speak about the visual content.

  • The key principles of Presentation Zen are: Restraint in preparation. Simplicity in design. Naturalness in delivery. These principles can be applied to both technical and nontechnical presentations

  • If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland (Graywolf Press) is one of the most inspiring and useful books I have ever read.

  • Pecha Kucha is a global presentation phenomenon started in 2003 by Tokyo-based expatriate architects Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein. (Pecha kucha is Japanese for “chatter.”

  • Two of the more inconsequential questions I get—and I get these a lot—are “How many bullets should I use per slide?” and “How many slides per presentation is good?” My answer? “It depends on a great many things... how about zero?”

  • What is my point? And why does it matter?

  • Peter Drucker said it best: “The computer is a moron.” You and your ideas (and your audience) are all that matter. So

  • Second, after you have prepared your presentation, go back and edit like crazy, eliminating parts that are not absolutely crucial to your overall point or purpose. You must be ruthless. When in doubt, cut it out.

  • A presentation is never just about the facts.

  • Our lives are frittered away by detail; simplify, simplify. —Henry David Thoreau

  • A key tenet of the Zen aesthetic is kanso or simplicity. In the kanso concept, beauty and visual elegance are achieved by elimination and omission.

  • McCloud says cartooning is a form of amplification through simplification because the abstract images in comics are not so much the elimination of detail as they are an effort to focus on specific details.

  • These four principles—contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity—are not all there is to know about graphic design. But, understanding these simple, related concepts and applying them to slide design can make for far more satisfying and effective designs.

  • Design matters. But design is not about decoration or ornamentation. Design is about making communication as easy and clear for the viewer as possible.

  • Keep the principle of signal-to-noise ratio in mind to remove all nonessential elements.

  • People remember visuals better than bullet points. Always ask yourself how you can use a strong visual—including quantitative displays—to enhance your narrative.

  • When you stand, do so with your feet comfortably but firmly planted about shoulder-width apart. You should not stand like a cowboy about ready to draw his guns, but neither should you stand with your legs together as if standing at attention.

  • Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind. —Cicero

  • Make a strong start with PUNCH. Include content that is personal, unexpected, novel, challenging, or humorous to make a connection from the beginning.

  • Image. Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness, says there are essentially two types of smiles, the “Duchenne smile” and the “Pan American smile.” The Duchenne smile is the genuine smile, characterized by movement of the muscles around the mouth and also the eyes. You can tell a real smile by how the skin around the eyes wrinkles up a bit. The Pan American smile is the fake smile that involves voluntary movement around the mouth only.