If you’re a presenter you need to be watching TED talks. Great ideas delivered by some of today’s very best speakers.

The video below is one I ran across on YouTube just yesterday, and its message has been on my mind all yesterday and today. In the talk, Jason Fried, one of the founders of 37signals, and the co-author of Rework, one of my favorite business books of late, discusses M&M’s which he blames (rather than Facebook and Twitter) for most of the problems with getting things done in the modern office.

On a similar note, check out yesterday’s brief post by Seth.

One of the most invisible attributes of good design, and therefore hardest to master (for me anyway), is the grid system. Wikipedia defines a grid system as “a two-dimensional structure made up of a series of intersecting vertical and horizontal axes used to structure content. The grid serves as an armature on which a designer can organize text and images in a rational, easy to absorb manner.” Today’s Tutorial Tuesday is a collection of a few resources you can use to get you started thinking about grid systems in your slide designs.

Grids Are Good

This presentation by Khoi Vinh and Marc Boulton offers a great explanation of the history of the grid and then lets you watch a designer at work as he builds the layout for a website. The explanation is fairly simple to understand, and seeing it really drives the concepts home. And it’s a beautiful set of slides to boot. (Click the image below to download the presentation.)

The Grid System (.org)

TheGridSystem.org touts itself as “the ultimate resource in grid systems” and is (not surprisingly) a well-organized site for all things grid including books, articles, tools and templates. I particularly enjoyed having the ability to toggle the site’s own grid on and off using the button in the upper right corner. Clever.

Five simple steps to designing grid systems

This five part series of blog posts by the afore mentioned Marc Boulton features good things to think about when grid-building. It’s targeted at web designers, but I think most of the principles apply to presentations as well. I enjoyed it and I hope you will, too.

Cows are boring. Everyone knows this. We drive by them in our cars and never give them a second glance. But what if tomorrow one of them turned out to be purple? Would you stop the car and hang around for a few minutes? You bet you would. Purple cows are remarkable. So we take notice.

In his book, Purple Cow, Seth Godin says that all new products, projects, and businesses of any kind must be Purple Cows. They must distinguish themselves from the herd of products, projects and business the world is so used to seeing everyday. Only by being remarkable will they get noticed. And only by getting noticed can they be successful. The worst thing they can do is the same thing as everybody else.

Being a Purple Cow takes creativity. It takes cleverness. It takes innovation. It means learning what’s out there already and rather than using it as a pattern, asking instead how you can do the opposite. And then, once you’ve identified what the opposite is, it means having the courage to actually do it.

Look around at the state of presentations today. Most of us can identify the trends. Bullets. Clip art. Presenters who apologize for poor delivery, content, slide design.

What an opportunity! How hard would it be to be a Purple Cow? To distinguish yourself from the crowd? To be different enough to get the recognition it takes to be successful?

Do you have the courage to make your presentations remarkable?

Well, Black Friday is upon us once again, and if you’re reading this, you are obviously at home, among the ranks of online-shopping Illuminati. Wise choice.

To aid you in your quest, I’ve got a little list here of thoughtful gifts for the presenter(s) in your life. All kinds of gifts, all kinds of price points. Hopefully you can find something here that’s agreeable to your budget and your recipient’s tastes. Or perhaps you need a few things for your own wish list…

Happy shopping!

Books

Resonate: Present Visual Stories That Transform Audiences by Nancy Duarte

Nancy Duarte’s new book came out just a few months ago, but it’s already a classic of presentation design theory and practice. Resonate is the prequel to her hugely successful book, Slideology. Her second book focuses on story as it relates to presenting, and is basically THE manual for creating the content of your next speech or presentation. I haven’t finished my copy yet, but I am halfway through and it’s tremendous so far. Of course, if your presenter doesn’t yet have Slideology, I highly recommend that one as well. ~$17.00

The Naked Presenter by Garr Reynolds

This has been a big year for Mr. Reynolds, publishing not one but TWO presentation books! His first book, Presentation Zen, was and is excellent. Then came Presentation Zen Design, equally incredible for different reasons, in December of last year. And now, in just a few weeks, his new book, The Naked Presenter, hits shelves. It’s already available for pre-order on Amazon and ought to make it in time for Christmas. I’m sure it will be the same high caliber content as his first two works. Any of these three would make great gifts for any teacher, preacher, or speaker. ~17.00

Gadgets

Logitech Cordless Presenter

This is the presentation remote I use. It has a tiny USB receiver that actually stores in the handle itself. It works on Mac (with both Keynote and PowerPoint) or PC without needing to install any software and has a range of 50 ft. It has a laser pointer, volume control, blank screen button, and a countdown timer to make sure you don’t run over. ~$90.00

Digital Voice Recorder

It’s a good idea to record yourself giving speeches in order to critique yourself. Digital recorders are very inexpensive these days and are very slim and easy to use. I don’t own one myself but I have several friends who use them. The Sony ICD-PX820 has good reviews on Amazon and in pretty reasonably priced. Very worthwhile investment if you ask me. ~$55.00

Apple iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter

If your presenter friend is an iPad owner, this is a must. It works along with Keynote for iPad to allow him or her to connect their iPad directly to a projector. It’s pricey for what you get, but no one else makes ‘em and Apple knows it. You could also add an iTunes gift card to the mix to help purchase Keynote for iPad if he or she doesn’t have it yet. $29.00

The High End

Microsoft PowerPoint 2010

Yes, the most ubiquitous presentation software on the planet got an update this year. Many improvements have arrived including the ability to embed and edit videos directly in the tool. Other improvements include better animations and transitions and the ability to work with presentations online via the PowerPoint web app. ~$139.00

Optoma PICO Pocket Projector

Every good presenter knows that if something goes wrong in a presentation, it’s your fault. What better way to prevent projector mishaps than to bring a spare? The Optoma PICO Pocket Projector weighs just 4 ounces, runs off a rechargeable battery,  and can even connect to an iPad, iPod or iPhone with the included adapter. ~$199.00

iPad

For the gift giver with the deepest of pockets, the iPad really is the ultimate presentation tool. You can use it to build and run slideshows, edit images, record audio like a digital voice recorder, research your next speech, and watch videos of other presenters. Of course you’re buying more than a presentation tool here but presenting is definitely one of the things the iPad does best. For purely presentations, the 16 GB Wi-Fi version should be plenty good. ~$499.00+

Apple released version 4.2 of their iOS yesterday, making iPads even more awesome. I love that folders let me put all my apps on one screen. Also yesterday, Oprah gave away iPads (and lots of other things) on her final Oprah’s Favorite Things show. Ms. Winfrey had high praise for the iPad, calling it her “number one favorite thing ever.” The audience members seemed pretty excited about them, too. :^) Seems like everywhere you look more little apples are popping up all over the place.

[Image: Technically Incorrect]

In addition to many of the other great things they do, the stellar displays on iPads and iPods are great for displaying presentations. Slides look great on them, as at least one company in particular has already realized. However, you may be at a loss for how to get your slides onto an iPad. And if you don’t have one, you may at least want to make your presentations iPad-friendly. Whatever your situation, today’s Tutorial Tuesday is a roundup of articles that’ll help you figure things out.

Keynote For iPad

Probably the most obvious answer is to build your slides directly on an iPad using Apple’s excellent Keynote for iPad app. Keynote for iPad is a pretty amazing little tool, well worth the $9.99 you’ll spend on it. It’s easy to use and is very fully featured, allowing you to do pretty much everything you should need to do. Here’s a an excellent tutorial by Ana Foureaux Frazao on reconstructing your current slides in Keynote to get you started.

Convert Your Slides To Images

Another option is to convert your current slides to images and then upload them to your mobile device. This is very easy, and it great if you’ve already created slides that would be hard or impossible to recreate in Keynote. Here’s a great little video made by Ed Fidgeon Kavanagh on exactly how to accomplish this.

Convert Your Slides To A Movie

Similar to the option above is the option of converting your slides into a movie that will play and advance on it’s own. This option is a little more complicated than the images route, but can be very useful, particularly if you want your slides to run automatically without the viewer having to click to advance. Here’s an eHow article on this.

SlideRocket

Just last week, the great folks over at SlideRocket unveiled a really slick new presentation viewer built in HTML5, which is specifically geared to run on mobile devices like the iPod or iPhone. The viewer appears to work really well, and this means you can store your presentations in the cloud and access them from anywhere you have an internet connection. This means you can upload your presentation from your PC or Mac, then pull it up on your iPad or iPhone any time. Pretty sweet. Check ‘er out here.

DropBox and iBooks

A last option I’ll share with you is DropBox. If you don’t use DropBox yet, I highly recommend it for a number of reasons. But for our purposes today, its iPad/iPhone app makes it very easy to get a PDF version of your slides onto your device. Once there, you can choose to open the PDF file in DropBox itself or send it to the iBooks app for easy viewing as well. Both viewers work great. And both of these apps are free in the app store.

What have I missed? Are there even better ways of getting slide on your iPad out there?