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I can remember very clearly the first time I saw an iPod. I was working as a math tutor in college and one of the students in the tutoring lab had one on his desk. This was back when iPods were new and still looked like an electronic deck of playing cards. He wasn’t using it at the time so there were no tell-tale headphones in sight and I didn’t know what to make of it. I asked him about it and he explained that it was like a portable hard-drive. I can remember thinking how pointless that was. Why would anyone want that?

Today, the iPod Video I received as a Christmas present back in 2005 is one of the few objects I carry with me everyday.

As a converted Apple fanboy, I’m constantly amazed by how consistently the creative minds at Apple are able to fill needs that we consumers didn’t even know we had. It’s remarkable how well they understand the technologies that their audience might want or need and are able to fill those needs even without their customers asking for it. That seems like an extremely hard task.

In my experience, introducing people to presentation design is just like that. Everyone who sees it agrees that the end result is incredible, but until they have that first experience seeing someone with great slides they assume the status quo is as good as it gets. Presentation design offers a solution they don’t realize they want yet.

Filling a need that so many people already have is what truly excites me about presentation design. The sheer number of people who are frustrated and tired with boring slide-shows is staggering. And yet so many of them just assume they have to continue to produce or put up with bad PowerPoint and aren’t actively looking for something better.

It’s exciting to me to get to share such a satisfying solution with them.