Prezi.com

Going back to the basics and then beyond them.
As promised I wanted to post my initial reactions to the very promising new presentation tool Prezi.com. This quote from their intro presentation is a great place to start.


To be clear, despite any new technology the fact remains that it is much easier to ruin a good speech with a bad PowerPoint (or other visual aids) than it is to make a good presentation better with good visual aids.

Here in a great clip from the great show Mad Men on AMC Don Draper gives an inspiring presentation to the Kodak engineers who are shopping for a Marketing company, this is good presenting 101:


Key elements he used:

1) Emotion
2) Story
3) Images
4) Little to no text on the screen.

When we add all of the glitz and glamor to what we can do with PowerPoint today, it is easy to forget what makes this medium so powerful in the first place. Think back to the last presentation you gave, better yet the last presentation you had to sit through. What was the most memorable part? The long list of bullet points or was it an image, or diagram? The easiest change we can all make that makes the biggest improvement is to use more images and less text.

I will save other ways to improve presentations for later posts.

There are two fundamental concepts that prezi.com introduces.

1) It finally breaks the rigid linear paradigm of having one slide after another, from beginning to end.

2) It adds the ability to display meaningful visual structures of information, that remain in tact both on the screen and therefore in the viewers minds.

Once I have had a chance to build and deliver a few presentations using prezi, I will share more.