Resources for Presentation Design & Delivery

Many people ask me about resources available to help them become better presenters and build better presentations.  There are two individuals that I think are doing particularly outstanding work.  I highly suggest checking out their blogs and books.  Links are provided below.

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Garr Reynolds

Garr is perhaps my favorite author that speaks and writes on presenting.  An American transplant in Japan, his blog, Presentation Zen, is an excellent resource.  His unique angle on the topic is the way he incorporates elements of Japanese zen and culture into his work (hint: simplicity and harmony are incredibly important).  He also has a great presentation tips page on his website.  Some of his books (again, highly recommended) include:

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery  By Garr Reynolds

This is Garr’s original book, updated to a second edition. I consider this to be the absolute best book out there on the topic.  It gives a great mix of delivery and design advice and it does so in a really engaging visual way.  If you only purchase one of these, this one is it!

Presentation Zen DESIGN: Simple Design Principles and Techniques  By Garr Reynolds

This is one of Garr’s follow-up works that focuses exclusively on the design of slides.  It provides some of the same information found in Presentation Zen, but GREATLY expands on it in much more detail.  You’ll find out more about using color, fonts, images, etc. effectively.

The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides  By Garr Reynolds

Another follow-up work by Garr.  This book focuses more on the delivery aspects of giving a presentation.  As the title says, you don’t need to have slides to deliver a great presentation.  This work is more conceptual in nature, providing was of constructing great narrative arcs in your work.

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Nancy Duarte

Nancy is another excellent presenter.  She is the head of the eponymously named, Duarte, that provides presentation design services to clients.  “Duarte creates presentations and offers training based on our unique VisualStory™ methodology, which applies storytelling and visual thinking to craft persuasive communications designed to shift audience beliefs and behaviors.” She also provides many tips and tricks in her books:

Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations  By Nancy Duarte

This book provides a great overall resource for both presentation design and delivery.  You’ll find many similar themes between this and Garr Reynold’s work.  It’s great to compare the two and pick up new insights.

Resonate: Present Visual Stories That Transform Audiences  By Nancy Duarte

This is a follow-up work to Slide:ology that focuses more on honing your ideas and message.

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This post is part of my ongoing series Presentations that Pop!

Paul G. Brown frequently speaks and consults on presentation design, social media, student learning and development, and other topics.  To find out more about brining him to your campus or next event, visit his “Speaking, Consultation & Media” page. 

Facebook Graph Search Just Made Your Job Search More Interesting

Facebook Graph Search proves just how important building up your social network contacts can be.  This new search feature, which has been slowly rolling out over the past few months, allows one to make “micro-level” searches.  For instance, you can search for “my friends that like Lionel Richie” or “my family that visited Peoria.”  These are just a few suggestions, but the options go much much further.  If you have the feature through Facebook, you can try their guided tour here.

In any event, I recently discovered how incredibly useful this can be in job searching.  One of my students was recently interviewing for a position at Dean College.  I decided to search my network to see if I had any connections I could make for him.  I started my search with “friends that went to Dean College.”

The Bacon Kitty George Takei Star Wars Experience

I’m not completely above baiting people with key buzzwords on occasion to get more traffic.  Bacon?  Check.  Cats and Kittens?  Check.  George Takei?  Oh my!  And Star Wars?  What a Wookie.

This semester I had the incredible experience of taking MI621: Social Media for Managers in the Carroll School for Management at Boston College.  I learned a lot through this course, not only about social media itself, but how to teach with it.  The experiences was a bit meta.   One of the questions that frequently reappeared throughout the course, however, was:

What is the definition of social media?

Well, we never did answer this question, but we seemed to have at least defined the dartboard if not the bullseye.  Although when hearing “social media” one often thinks it is a new phenomena ala Facebook or Twitter, in reality I think there are a lot of types of media that are social.  Telephone calls?  Printed media?  Postal mail?   I think so.  They’re slower in some ways, yes, and the means of sharing is often more limited, for sure, but aren’t they perhaps still a form of social media?  People create.  People connect.  People share.

Ignite!-ing AERA

I’m excited to have been invited to present during a Presidential Session at the American Educational Research Association Conference this coming week in San Francisco, CA.  Many of you may be familiar with my previous work in organizing a PechaKucha session for the ACPA-College Student Educators, International Convention this past spring.  For those of you unfamiliar, PechaKucha is a style of presentation where there are 20 slides, each displayed for 20 seconds, and they are automatically set to advance while the presenter speaks over them.  It is a fun but very challenging presentation style.

Previous posts on PechaKucha:

• PechaKucha is Coming to the #ACPA13 Convention
• The Future of Student Affairs in Six Minutes and Forty Seconds at #ACPA13
• Presenting PechaKucha Style at #ACPA13

At AREA I will be presenting in a variant style of PechaKucha known as an “Ignite.”  The only difference between the two is that Ignite presentations only show the slides for 15 seconds each.  The resulting presentation is 5 minutes long instead of 6 minutes and 40 seconds.  The presentation I am doing is a new and improved version of my PechaKucha from ACPA.  It is titled “The Emergence of the Student Cyborg” and is embedded below.  Viewing the slides won’t help you much, as most of the presentation is what is given verbally, but it will at least give you a preview.

I’m Going to be a Guest on Student Affairs Live: Building Innovative Slidedecks

I had a blast as a guest on the Student Affairs Live broadcast on Wednesday, April 24 at Noon EST.  We talked about how to design and give presentations.  I love this topic and frequently present on it, and media design in general, to my students.  If you’re curious about some of my work, you can check it out on SlideShare.  I also have some of my print design work (albeit old stuff) here.

The link to the show is here.  I’ve also embedded a recording below.

Your Professional Network is Powered by Bacon

Last week I started an experiment called the “6 Degrees of Esther Lloyd-Jones Project,” a play on Six Degrees of Separation and the popular “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game.  I was motivated by the desire to see how small the student affairs profession is and discover the power of crowdsourcing on the internet.  It’s still ongoing, so please visit the page and keep contributing!  A week in, however, I wanted to share with you some of the learning I gained in starting this project.  There are far too many outcomes to list in one blog post, so stay tuned for more.  Also, I will most definitely be turning this into a professional conference presentation.

Reflections from Beantown: Helping the Helpers

I was lucky enough to be in Texas and not back home in Boston during the explosions at the Boston Marathon, but of course my thoughts were immediately with my students, friends and family in the area.  I also had the firsthand experience of having my cell phone pinged with texts and messages from those making sure I was ok… and the experience of trolling Facebook and Twitter to make sure those that I knew who might be close to the explosions had posted that they were safe.  One of my students finished the marathon about 20 minutes before the explosions went off.  Quite the sobering reality.

Once I determined my loved ones were safe, my thoughts turned to my students and colleagues, many of whom are in a helping profession.  They are the counselors, the advisors, and the crisis first-responders.  Although our immediate thoughts are with the victims and their families, as they should be, it reminded me about how we can’t forget those that are the helpers.  Yes, the firefighters, the police and others… absolutely… but also those that work behind the scenes that often respond and give support without thought for themselves… those that rarely are given a spotlight.

I’ve been there before: directing massive crowds, evacuating buildings, staying behind at scenes that are unsafe just to make sure the last person is accounted for, comforting students who lost loved ones or just don’t know what happened to them, and helping other students cope with and make sense of difficult events.  I wasn’t formally trained in all of his, but many skills you pick up along the way.  When you’re a helper, you don’t think about yourself in the moment.  You just do.  You spring into action.  It’s, in part, your job, but it’s also a part of who you are as a person.  You take pride in that.

But the difficulties of working through a hard or traumatic event, that are set-aside in the moment, often emerge afterwards.  One of the difficulties of being in a helping profession is that you need to remember to take care of yourself.  For someone who gives to others, this is often something that is hard to accept in return.  Who helps the helpers?

As I prepare to teach a class to my students at Boston College tomorrow (a university which is directly on the marathon route, albeit miles away from the finish line), I know I will begin with a processing through of yesterdays events.  Not only does it present an enormous learning opportunity, but also a time to make sure THEY are ok.  We’re all in this together.  Let’s not forget about the helpers and help them too.

The Six Degrees of Esther Lloyd-Jones Project

The Six Degrees of Esther-Llyod Jones Project is a crowdsourced initiative I started to learn more about how current student affairs professionals can trace their lineage back to some of the founders of our profession.  Click on the following link below to go to the page where you will find out more information about the project, how to engage with it, and how to contribute to it by adding your information.

> > > Go to the Esther Lloyd-Jones Project < < <

Cookies in the Lounge! What The College Dorm Can Teach Us About Building Community Online

“Door decs” with your name on it… Crafting in the lobby… An icebreaker where you rhyme your name with a vegetable… you might be surprised by how a college Resident Assistant (RA) goes about building and maintaining community.  Of course, the RA position is far more complex than the stereotype that often gets portrayed, or the hokey activities that are often the source of satire, but some of this “hokiness” is there because it works… and yes, some of it is just hokey.

One of the current courses I am taking at Boston College is MI621: Social Media for Managers in of the Caroll School of Management. During a recent meeting of the course, we heard from Jen Reddy, the Senior Vice President for Global Marketing from Communispace.  Communispace is an innovative marketing and research firm that crates online “communities of insight” comprised of customers and demographic groups that advise client companies on numerous issues. Although an oversimplification, these communities act like extended focus groups that can be mined for qualitative feedback and ideas. Their unique community nature provides more powerful and different insights than might be generated through other methods.

Listening to Jen speak got me thinking about my past work in residence life and how principles of community building in those contexts might carry over to online communities. I was excited to discover that much of what some of the Community Managers at Communispace do in creating insight communities was eerily similar to what I’ve spent 10 years advising undergraduates and professionals to carry out.

Bowling Leagues, Cheers Bar, and Central Perk: Cultivate a Third Place, Cultivate Your Brand

In his 1989 work, The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg floated the idea of our needing a “third place.” Our first place is our home, where we live. Our second place is our work, where we spend a large portion of our time. Our “third place,” however, is an informal space that brings us together in community and where we interact with others and build social bonds. Classic “third places” in pop culture have included the bar from the television show Cheers and Central Perk, the coffee shop from Friends. At our colleges and universities, these may include dining halls, student unions, student activity offices or residence hall lounges.  These third places are important because they serve as anchors in civic society. They create spaces where “regulars” can meet to build relationships, develop community and join in conversation. They create an opportunity to connect with, build empathy for, and bond with fellow citizens outside of the confines of our family and work relationships.