Making Better Presentations

The life of a landscape architect inevitably involves making presentations. Open Forum has a helpful blog post from Guy Kawasaki of How to Change the World. In it, he interviews Nancy Duarte, author of slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. A few tips I particularly liked were to to develop your ideas before creating your slides and to design slides to help people remember the content of the presentation and not for you to remember what to say. We have all hated listening to a presenter read their slides. Slides should only reinforce the message. In addition, she adds that you need to put yourself in your audience's shoes and understand their needs. This seems like common sense, but it is easier said than done. She offers a series of questions to ask yourself to help you better understand your audience's needs. The book looks interesting. I plan on checking it out. Between using Sitephocus' photos and this book, I hope to improve my presentations. Since incorporating beautiful photography and reducing the text, I feel my presentations have improved immensly. My hope is that this book will help fine tune the message and better meet the needs of my audiences.