Create Slides People Will Remember by Nancy Duarte

If you have been reading this blog for a little while now, you would know how one of the various different things that I keep trying to do, but fail miserably, struggling all along, is to embark myself into writing over here relatively shorter blog posts versus the rather lengthy essays that seem to have been more of the norm all along. Don’t take me wrong. Somehow the vast majority of you folks seem to enjoy those lengthy articles quite a bit, since blog traffic tripled throughout 2012 from previous years, but I am starting to think that it wouldn’t hurt to have little snacks every now and then, while we are all on the move, about interesting things that are happening out there, or relevant links worth while sharing across with an annotation or two, or just simply, reflect about a crazy new idea, a new thought, a new interesting initiative that may have caught my attention, etc. with just a few words to then develop it further along as time moves on and things settle down a bit. Well, here’s my zillionth attempt into aiming for shorter blog posts. Will it blend this time around?

I am not sure whether it will stick around, or not, but I guess it’s worth while trying it out, once again, don’t you think?, and see how it goes… Now, I am not thinking about stopping writing lengthier blog entries, at least, not for the time being. I am thinking more along the lines of combining both longer pieces with shorter bites of things that may have caught my attention and that I would want to perhaps develop further along on it at a later time. Or if it has got to do with something related to Productivity and how we can improve, collectively, our overall sense of Effectiveness as knowledge Web workers, by all means, I am going to give it a try and experiment with this new form of combining both shorter and longer articles to help perhaps make the blog a bit more dynamic. That’s maybe the reason why it took me so long to come back to this blog in the first place. The fact that I kept aiming for longer pieces where I needed to reflect perhaps more than I should. So maybe I can prepare now for those crazy busy times ahead of me (As I am entering my last week of vacation) when time will be scarce but ideas plenty and I would need to have a place to air them out, so I don’t forget about them for when things may slow down and I can pick them up again. 

So what a better way of kicking off these shorter blog posts than sharing a link to a rather interesting YouTube video that I bumped into a few weeks back and which I think would be incredibly helpful for those people who, like me, do plenty of public speaking and could do with a few tips on creating slides people will remember. That’s, indeed, the suggestive and rather intriguing topic that Nancy Duarte talked about on this video presentation that I can certainly recommend everyone to go through, since it’s just a bit over 2 minutes long, but pretty packed up with some excellent tips that I thought I would briefly quote over here, as a teaser, to get you all going: 

1. “Use Slides Selectively
2. Write the slides after you have prepared the speech
3. Design slides people can “get” in 3 seconds
4. Storyboard one concept per slide
5. Remember that slides are a visual medium”

Here is the direct link to the video, in case you may not be able to play it through the embedded version below: 

I guess if this year we are, finally, at long last!, declaring war to PowerPoint and presentations in general, Nancy just shared across with all of us a nice, smart, succinct, knowledgeable manner of doing it without dying in the attempt, don’t you think? I particularly love item #1 which is why during the course of 2013 I’ll keep aiming to reduce tremendously my dependency on visuals and focus more on the power of the word, of emotion, of passion, essentially, on what drives me to do what I do and what I care about: having a good conversation where I can learn just as much as the audience does, if not more! That’s what presentations are all about. The rest are just master classes.