I have just finished reading Garr Reynolds PresentationZen Design which was an excellent follow-up to PresentationZen.
Image from Garr Reynolds site PresentationZen
The book is very easy to read and provides useful insight from Garr as well as other experts in this area. So what is the book all about? Firstly it provides a great grounding why design matters for you presentations and secondly it goes into how you can improve your presentation design following some simple rules or guidelines. The book really makes you think about your presentation and how can they be improved. I think this is particularly important given the amount of presentations I have written, used and attended where text takes over the screen with the focus on this rather than the presenters. The good thing is over the last 2-3 years I have seen a change happen in technical presentations where less content in terms of text, bullet points and information overload.
Hopefully the presentations I give today are an improvement and will continue that way 
The book can be found on Amazon here
Today was about finishing my presentation on social networking for the premium support team at work tomorrow. All was going well until I needed to depict tagging and dogears. So after having a quick look around on the web and not finding a royalty-free / free image of either I decided the only option was to take my own photos. I then had to make a decision quick and easy or thoughtful and professional. As time was against me it was going to be quick and dirty to get some images I wanted.
The first one was a simple request of a pick of a dogear, this is basically when someone folds the corner of a page in a book over, so first I grabbed an appropriate book in the shape of Wikinomics. Book set and it did pained me to dogear the book but these things need to be done. After a short time this was the image a I used, it was dark and moody due to no flash…
dogear
The second image was the need for a depiction of tagging so out came the post it notes and pens and off I went to produce some very simple tags, this was the outcome..
tagging
Let’s hope the presentation as a whole works, and I am loving using Keynote in anger for the first time..
So on Saturday got my camera out, the first time for about two months to take a few snaps of the little boy and his reaction to the Xmas tree, now that these have been taken I must get round to downloading them to my mac to have a play to see if any are up to the job. Its been so long since I have used my camera in anger that I have decided that over the Xmas period I will try and take at least 10 photo’s a day on general stuff to get my eye back in. I will also start looking at more abstract subjects so that I can start to build a stock photo library for my presentations.
Why the stock library? Well that has come about when I was looking for some photos for a presentation and found it very difficult to find free one, although there are lots of sites that do have free photos some times they just don’t have the style of images I want. As you can expect all the really good shots cost money which is fair enough. So decided that how about tackling some of my need by taking my own photos.
We will need to wait and see how I get on, I also must sort out my current photo libraries as they are in the usual chaotic mess, I feel the need for another clear down and reorganise so I can find the photos I want.
Leopard taken in Kenya
so days are slipping away fast and on Friday its the little boys first Xmas concert at nursery so that will be interesting how they will herd so many cats, I predict chaos
Just jazzed up one of my presentations on Lotus Quickr to take some of the words out to be replaced by visuals, will see how it works tomorrow. I am hope to pick another presentation and spend some serious time revamping to see if I can make wholesale changes to bring it away from the boring/dull technical presentations that I give on an almost daily basis. Watch this space to see what comes of both of these activities. I can see it now and the techies will say its too marketing, which I will have to disagree with as why do they need the word written down if I am presenting the fact verbally. The plan would be to provide the recipient with a document to confirm the details and not a soft copy of the presentation.
