I was in the band and chorus for most of my academic career and the majority of my friends were people I met in these programs: musicians, actors, directors, etc. When we got to college, I spent a large amount of time in and around the music buildings even though I was never a music major myself. One of the requirements of my friends’ music curriculum was to attend a minimum number of professional musical performances each semester. The idea was that in order to give a great performance you must first observe the great performances of others.

The same applies to almost any other discipline. You can read countless books and spend hours in the practice room improving your skills, but how do you know when you’re good enough. Sure you’ve improved since you started, but how good are you really?

If you want to improve the caliber of your presentation skills, it’s best to watch true professionals in action. Below are some online resources you can use to find countless examples of masterfully crafted messages (and slides), expertly delivered.

1. TED

The annual TED conference gives world-class speakers 18 minutes to talk about whatever they want. And the best part is that they film all of the speeches in high-quality video which they then make available for free on their website. If you need some inspiration or just want to hear some awesome ideas about the world we live in, I recommend you check out some of the talks on TED.com.

A great example of the kind of talks available at TED (and one of the greatest examples I’ve seen of data display, EVER) is Hans Rosling’s 2006 speech on global development. Watch it below.

2. Slideshare

Slideshare.net is the YouTube of PowerPoint. Anyone can post their slides for the world to see. Just like YouTube, there’s a lot of sub-par stuff out there but there’s some pretty great stuff there as well. Presenters can also add audio to make “slidecast,” the powerpoint equivalent of a podcast.

Garr Reynolds’ slides summarizing Dan Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind, are below.

3. Note & Point

If all you’re after is some good-looking slides, look no further. Note & Point gathers excellently designed slides from all over and makes them available for download. The site focuses on form over content but is a great place to look for some presentation design inspiration. This deck by Lionel Gadoury on the importance of brand, design and storytelling is a good place to start.

There are countless other resources out there, but hopefully this three will give you plenty of good presentations to cull through. The important idea, of course, is to constantly look at what others are doing as a way of sharpening your own skills and keeping your creative juices flowing.

When you give a presentation, whether you use PowerPoint or not, your ultimate goal is to inspire some sort of action in your audience. Even if all you want them to do is remember you, or more importantly your message, you need to make sure that you do everything possible to make your message something that they’ll remember afterward. You need to ensure that your presentation stands out amid a sea of presentations. And if you use visuals, they need to do the same. It is with that idea in mind that I recommend you completely abandon the use of slide templates as much as possible. There are (precious few) times when they can be useful but in my experience they do more to undermine your presentation than they do to help it.

The reason for this is simple: templates don’t work they way we think they do. We use templates because they seem like an easy way to add interesting color and design to our presentations without having to devote much effort to picking colors and laying out our images and bullets. We also assume that the folks at Microsoft who developed PowerPoint gave careful consideration to how they organized their templates and that those templates give us the best of all possible arrangements of text and graphics. Unfortunately, both of those assumptions are false.

Simply filling in the provided text boxes is a sure way to make sure your presentation is generic and uninteresting.

The templates included in PowerPoint are terrible if for no other reason than if you follow their advice and fill them in properly you will produce boring and generic slides that actually make it harder for your audience to retain your message. In my opinion templates, more than any other feature in slideware technology, cause what we know as “death-by-PowerPoint.” These templates encourage us to add bullet point after bullet point, cramming more and more information into each slide until it is “full.” They then “help us” by forcing us to choose a single image to summarize all of the points on the slide. This is simply not the best way to go about constructing a compelling presentation.

Here are a couple of tips to help you cast off the shackles of presentation templates:

1. Start with pencil and paper.
Garr Reynolds, the author of Presentation Zen, calls this ‘going analog.’ The idea is that before you even turn on your computer you begin to plan the visuals for your presentation on paper. These don’t have to be professional quality renderings so don’t worry if your drawing skills aren’t top notch. No one will see these but you anyway. You should have already outlined the main points of your presentation, so try to brainstorm graphics or images that will illustrate your points creatively or uniquely. Experiment with different ways of conveying the same point and choose the one you think makes your point the most clear and memorable. You should only present one idea per slide, so each point you make should have it’s own supporting image, chart, graphic, etc. Don’t settle for an image that almost fits. Use a stock photography site (I use iStockPhoto.com) to find the perfect image to convey your message.

2. Select the ‘blank slide’ layout.
Now that you have your slides sketched out visually on paper, it should be simple to recreate those slides digitally. Since you already have an idea of where your images and text will go, you don’t need to worry about choosing the right slide layout from the dozens offered. Simply choose ‘blank’ from the list and start with a fresh canvas, adding images and text boxes as you go. This will allow you to add only the elements that are absolutely needed, instead of feeling pressured to “fill up” what’s already there. It will surprise you how much easier it is to get your slide to look the way you want it when you start from scratch and the new amount of freedom to place things anywhere and to set the fonts and such yourself may even feel a little liberating to you.

3. Exercise restraint.
Now that you know that you can place things anywhere on a slide, it can be easy to get carried away. Your goal should not be to see how much you can cram onto the slide, but to get your message across with as little as possible. Often a single, full-bleed image (an image that fills the whole slide is said to appear to be “bleeding” off the edges of the slide) with well typeset text is all you need to convey your point effectively. Also, be conscious of your choice of fonts and colors. You should only use one font (two, at the most) for the entire presentation. Your slides should look like they belong together and using a well-chosen font can help make this happen. You can then use slight variations in that font (size, color, weight, etc.) to emphasize important words or points. The same is true for transitions: you really only need one. Choose a transition that fits the feel of your presentation and then stick with it. Multiple transitions and animations only distract from your message.

There are of course many other nuances to designing a good presentation, but I believe the first, most important step to remember is to stay away from PowerPoint’s templates. If you can use your imagination and creativity to choose how you want your presentation to look instead of relying on the computer to do that for you it’s almost guaranteed to be more effective. You may even enjoy the experience of exercising some creative muscles and thinking like a designer for a while. And I can guarantee that no matter what you come up with, it will be better than the overused, generic templates all of the other guys are using.

The latest quit-smoking TV ad from Pfizer’s My Time To Quit campaign caught my eye a few days ago. I liked it for it’s clever use of typography, for it’s simple aesthetic, but most of all because it would work really well as a set of slides in PowerPoint or Keynote.

The ad, which features statements about trying to quit in which the text actually looks like a burning cigarette, obeys many of the basic rules about good slide design including but not limited to:

1. One idea per slide.
2. A simple layout.
3. Minimal words.
4. Each slide can be read in 3 seconds or less.
5. Clever use of type.
6. The use of builds to reveal bullet points.

I applaud the design team behind this ad for letting the simple text and animation speak for itself rather than allowing the message to become muddled in superfluous decoration and, for lack of a better term, chart junk. Good stuff.

You can watch the ad at Pfizer’s site.

Nancy Duarte, the author of Slide:ology and the instructor of some webinars I took not too long ago (which were excellent), is giving a free, 60-minute webinar on Slide:ology concepts tomorrow (October 8th) at 12:00 p.m. Central. It’s totally free, all you have to do is register and they’ll email you the login information. I recommend this to anyone who EVER uses PowerPoint, which is most of us.

Check out the link below for more information about registering.

Free Slideology Webinar

Your face is the most important visual aid you have. You use it everyday of your life to communicate, whether you know it or not. Even more than the words coming out of your mouth, the messages expressed through your face say a lot about you. Your facial expressions can reinforce the words you’re speaking, but they can also undermine them if you’re not careful. If, for example, while giving a presentation in front of a room-full of colleagues your brow becomes furrowed as you try to remember what part of your notes comes next, that same furrow may be interpreted by your audience in any number of ways, not excluding dishonesty, lack of confidence, and even contempt. Professional speakers know this and take steps to make sure that their facial expressions and body language enhance, or at the very least do not detract from, their message. They know that the face is the ultimate visual aid.

Think of your slides as a face. They’re your face. Projected forty feet tall behind you!

The visuals that accompany your spoken words in a presentation can communicate a multitude of messages that can have a tremendous impact on the way your message is received, just like the emotions on your face. If the chart you use to present your evidence looks crude or home-made then your audience may doubt the credibility of your conclusions. If you use cheap clip-art instead of well-chosen stock photography (or even better, photos produced specifically for your presentation) you may come across as cheap or send the message that you did not put much effort into your preparations.

If your face, which is made up of a relatively small surface area, is worthy of such attention and is capable of such expression, then aren’t your slides, which get projected to the size of a billboard behind you, equally important? Aren’t they worthy of just as much attention and forethought to make sure they communicate exactly what they should?

If you don’t believe that a set of well-designed slides will boost your self-confidence in front of your next audience I simply ask that you try it only once. And let us know how it goes.