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slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations
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| List Price: | CDN$ 43.99 |
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Product Description
No matter where you are on the organizational ladder, the odds are high that you've delivered a high-stakes presentation to your peers, your boss, your customers, or the general public. Presentation software is one of the few tools that requires professionals to think visually on an almost daily basis. But unlike verbal skills, effective visual expression is not easy, natural, or actively taught in schools or business training programs. slide:ology fills that void.
Written by Nancy Duarte, President and CEO of Duarte Design, the firm that created the presentation for Al Gore's Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, this book is full of practical approaches to visual story development that can be applied by anyone. The book combines conceptual thinking and inspirational design, with insightful case studies from the world's leading brands. With slide:ology you'll learn to:
- Connect with specific audiences
- Turn ideas into informative graphics
- Use sketching and diagramming techniques effectively
- Create graphics that enable audiences to process information easily
- Develop truly influential presentations
- Utilize presentation technology to your advantage
Millions of presentations and billions of slides have been produced -- and most of them miss the mark. slide:ology will challenge your traditional approach to creating slides by teaching you how to be a visual thinker. And it will help your career by creating momentum for your cause.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #149 in Books
- Published on: 2008-08-07
- Original language: English
- Binding: Paperback
- 296 pages
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Nancy Duarte has been a Principal of Duarte Design since 1990. Her firm is in the heart of the Silicon Valley and the client list is loaded with Fortune 500 companies. Her passion for business communications that are clear, meaningful and attractive has opened doors for her in a business world full of cluttered and complex visual communications. She speaks across the nation at conferences, authors training content and is a regular contributor to Presentations magazine.
Customer Reviews
Worth your time and money
"Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations", by Nancy Duarte is a book that will change the way you think about your presentations. Almost anybody who has ever had to deliver a presentation would benefit in some way from reading this book.
The structure of the book follows the process that you'll ideally use in the course of developing a presentation, from coming up with the presentation content itself to developing the slides. At every step of the way, Duarte explains not only how you should create your presentations (e.g. how graphs and charts should be presented), but also why your information should be presented that way. Following Duarte's advice results in a slide deck that supports and enhances your presentation, rather than having the deck detract from or (even worse) BE the presentation. The result is a presentation where there is actually a good reason for the existence and content of each slide.
You might be thinking that you're not a designer, so you won't be able to create a presentation as good as some of the examples highlighted in the book, but you don't need to be a designer to improve your presentations. The book does cover some of the fundamentals of design (color theory, fonts, etc.), and does so in an approachable way, so the non-designers in the crowd (which is most of us) will get at least some information about design fundamentals to help you improve your presentations.
A tiny nitpick is that I would have liked to see even more examples of 'good' slides in the book - or even better, more examples of bad slides being turned into good ones. The case studies are great, but many of them are accompanied by an often full-page photo of the presenter. I'd have preferred to see that space given over to more images of the slides.
Overall, I found this to be an excellent book that will easily and immediately reward the time you spend reading it.
Awesome and Useful
This is a great book with a lot of useful information on how to create powerful presentations for different situations and audiences. I like the fact that it show examples from simple presentations and illustrations to those for complex stories. Some of the case studies are particular useful for me because they remind me of some presentations I have created over the years, and now I have realized how wrong they were. There are also details in the book about color matching, 3D object creations, visual effects, and diagram creations. I read the book twice and still getting new ideas from the book. This book is certainly a must for professionals.
The only thing missing, I think, is a quick presentation slide in the book to show people that PowerPoint is not meant for documents.
An Excellent Review of Contemporary Thinking on Presentations
This is an excellent review of contemporary approach to Presentations. Nancy Duarte, prominent for having shaped Al Gore's approach to his climate change materials and leader of a design house, gives an excellent systematic treatment of Presentations, how to use them, when to use them, what presentations should not be. She covers Brainstorming, Layout, Diagrams, Data Presentation, Design principles, animation and more.
This is not an ideal book for the reader looking for a "How-to". Rather, it is aimed at the reader that has done many presentations and is looking for ways to becoming more effective as a presenter and those seeking to connect with audiences in more effective ways than current corporate presentation culture permits.
Two things stand out:
1st - The case studies, though highly condensed, are excellent. I would have liked to have seen more of them and longer ones.
2nd - The essential conundrum of corporate life isn't addressed - namely that we know, as the book states that a great 1 hour presentation should take 60-90 hrs to produce; but more often you have 8-10 hours to put it together. This book doesn't take up that subject but that in no way detracts from the content and effectiveness of the material that is covered.
Highly recommended.
