How does “coffee and milk” look like? Adrian pointed me to a couple of answers provided from a surprising angle.

There always is another surprising angle. Presentation is the art of revealing it.

Imagine yourself giving a talk. During the talk you want to use a metaphor related to how Copernicus revolutionized the way we understand the Universe. And now imagine your audience is formed by individuals like the one in this video.

(The question is: What gravitates around the Earth?)

Your audience is not stupid, but it might be different than you are. In fact, count on it being different. After all, would you say you are just like everyone else?

A story is effective only when it is rooted in what your audience knows and believes. Get to understand your audience as much as you can.

Line Rider is a very smart game with very simple rules. You have the rider, the gravity, the white space, and the possibility to draw lines. The rider is thrown in the white space, the gravity attracts the rider towards the bottom, and the lines define the landscape that influences the path of the rider. Your job is to design and build the path.

Here is my 13 seconds ride after half an hour of work:

I like very much the ideas behind the game. For one, a line has two sides. You bump on one side and get through the other. How is that for imagination?! This very simple twist enables you to create unexpected scenarios. For example, at the end of my movie, the rider goes through one side of a line and then bumps on the other side.

Another reason why I like the game is that I cannot influence the rider directly. I can only build the environment, and the experience comes from the intersection of the rules of the game and my design. That is very much what a presentation is. I can only design the environment with sounds and visuals, while the experience comes from the intersection of your rules and my design.

Yet another reason I like is that it pushed me to try, error and then try again. I did that until it pretty much did what I wanted. Yes, I know mine does not do much. Actually, it does not do exactly what I wanted it to, but after a while I started to like what I got and settled with that.

Here is a more elaborated ride built by someone else:

(You can find more such examples here)

You might notice how this example is a tiny bit more complex than my 30 minutes effort. You might also notice how their ride has a meaning, as opposed to mine. Both movies are loaded on YouTube: mine is called Simple Line Rider, and the other one is called Line Rider - Urban Run. Which one do you think has a better chance of being noticed and remembered?

The bottom line: I settled, they did not. Of course, I could say that they had a commercial interest, and of course I could say I did not have the time, or even that I did not have the tools. But, if what counts is your experience, my ride is irrelevant and I lose by a large margin.

You can always find reasons to settle. While settling can be just fine, just don’t mistake the reasons for excuses.

What you do with what is given to you is entirely up to you.

Slides are visual aids. That is, they are visual, and they are aids.

Not any visual will be an aid. To get effective visuals you have to design them, that is, to plan and craft them to help your story.

In the Format menu of PowerPoint you get an option to set the Slide Design. While PowerPoint’s Slide Design is certainly a design, it is many times not what you actually need for your talk. Slide Design is only about the your slide’s graphic design, and it is not necessarily the one that will help your story.

That is not to say that graphic design is not important. It is important, especially that much of our sensors are dedicated to vision. In fact, we rely so much on vision to understand the world, that we use “to see” as a synonym for “to understand”. Do you see my point?

Graphic design is important. A great book that will get you through the basic elements of graphic design is Alexander White’s The Elements of Graphic Design. Here is one of my favorite quotes from the book attributed to an anonymous source:

Design is not the abundance of simplicity. It is the absence of complexity.
- Anonymous

One particularly overlooked resource for graphic design is white space. Contrary to many expectations, white space is not a wasted space, and it is not necessarily white. White space is the space in between graphical objects that makes the objects get noticed.

Only when treated with the outmost respect will the white space reveal what is important. And only by seeing what is important will you see your story.

Advices on using white space in design appears over and over in different forms and in different areas. William Strunk Jr. advises us to omit needless words when designing our text. Edward Tufte advises us to minimize chart junk when designing our graphics.

As opposed to those advices, too often do the PowerPoint Slide Designs offer layouts that encourage you to fill the white space. And too often do presenters think of those Slide Designs as the only reasonable way to go.

Most of the slides I saw in presentations were slides with bullets. Truth be told I remember displaying such slides myself. Perhaps this phenomenon has something to do with the default slide layout in PowerPoint being named Bulleted List. The bulleted list layout splits the slide space into title space and bullets space. The bullets space is aligned top-left. How many times did you add just one bullet in this space? I bet it didn’t happen often. It would look odd. After all, bullets were invented to delimit several points.

To get another perspective on how slides can help you, take a look at Dick Hardt talking about Identity 2.0. This example renders the Slide Design completely useless, and uses white space as the only means of organization. Most of the time there is only one thing to look at, and because of that his voice stands out. And because the voice and the visuals are so well coordinated his story gets through.

(At the end of his presentation, you can notice a thank you note to Lawrance Lessig’s presentation style influence. You can read more about Lessig’s presentation style at Presentation Zen.)

Next time you work on your slides, ask yourself if the white space that you just filled does help your story. If it does not, do not hesitate to leave it white.

Fill the white space for a reason.

The first thought of a computer scientist when he enters a conference room: Is my laptop charged?
The second thought: Do I get wireless connection?

Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Why so? It is not because he does not care. It is just that he witnessed many presentations and he expects the next ones to be boring. He expects the presenters to not care for him.

Unfortunately, presenters that care are not the norm, they are the exception. Sad as it is, there actually is a good side to it:
The very moment you will show you care for the audience, you will be perceived as different and rewarded with gratitude. The network traffic will lower, and if you see laptops put away, take it as the highest gesture of appreciation.

In the beginning, there was just the story. Time has passed, and technology came in and provided tools to augment stories with visual and audio aids. Even more time has passed and the story became buried in technology. Today, the story is mostly forgotten and we’re left with technology.

I urge you to put back the story in your talk. Next time you start preparing your talk, do not prepare your slides, prepare your story and let the slides be just aids.

The talk is not your slides. The talk is your story.

I am a husband. I am a son. I am a friend. I hope I am no enemy. I am a proud Romanian. I play video games. I used to play chess. I do not exercise enough. I program. I research. I present. I am overweight. I have a PhD. I do not have a pet. I like a black drink with ice and no lemon. I like sushi. I like to write. I like to talk. I like movies. I dislike smoking. I wish I knew how to draw. I intend to blog.

I intend to blog about presentation, representation and the rest. Presentation is about communicating information, representation is about modeling it, and the rest is about what remains.