For those of you who did not guess, Tufte did not join our advisory board. And he did not make the statements in the blog post yesterday. It was just an April Fool’s joke. We are posting this clarification at the request of Mr. Tufte. We meant no offense - we think your critique of PowerPoint has spurred a lot of creativity in presentation design. We love your books and have them all in the SlideShare office (ok, I have not yet bought Beautiful Evidence, but I will rectify that today).

No, there are no algorithms for removing bullet points - SlideShare is a place for you to express yourself. If people like your slideshows, then it becomes popular, gets favorited, tagged, passed around. We don’t filter your content - express yourself as you want to, bullet points and all.

This post by Bert Decker is the second in our newly launched Slide Tips series.
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Although this series is about design in PowerPoint support – don’t go to the PowerPoints first. Design is essential. But before design comes something else. Purpose.

Garr Reynolds is an expert on presentation design – his article last week, along with his blog Presentation Zen and book of the same name, prove it. In today’s post, I’ll leave design to the expert, and focus on creating what I call a Communications Experience for your audience, whether it’s one person or one thousand. To put it all in context, here’s how to prepare for a powerful presentation:

1. Create the message: one that is listener-based, focused and with action.
2. Develop the slides that best support the message – but don’t become the message.
3. Deliver it powerfully, remembering that YOU are the presentation.

1. Create the Message

Yes, you need a message first. Unfortunately, this is counterintuitive to many business people who create slides and support material first, then add the words. In 90% of the cases, business people go to their computers and hammer out the PowerPoints in text, words and bullets – with precious few visuals, unfortunately. Or worse, they begin pulling slides from old presentations, hoping it will all come together. Then they add notes and comments that they’ll say verbally – and deliver the presentation, with little relief from the flood of information. You cannot effectively create slides without a purpose. The message comes first.

Information vs. Influence
If your purpose is strictly to inform in a presentation, with many words, text and data, go no further. Write a book. Use those words and text. Create a training manual, white paper, or essay. (All of which can, and often, take the form of a 176 slide PowerPoint deck.) This is perfectly acceptable for information-laden (often technical, and highly detail oriented) presentations. But you will be creating basically a written document, one that can stand on its own, and does not necessarily need your delivery to make it a presentation.
Unfortunately, the great majority of business presentations (of which I’ve seen over 10,000 in the last 20 years) are basically written documents that inform, but don’t influence. They don’t inspire. They don’t generate action. And they certainly are not well designed.
Think of your next presentation as an opportunity to transform information to influence. Don’t give a status quo update to your leadership team on key metrics. Call them to elevate next quarter’s performance by allocating budget to your initiative. Why would you read information from an outline when you can answer a higher calling by making that information relevant to your listener, focused and action-oriented?
To prepare your message, begin with the end in mind. With what inspiration or action will people leave the room? Three elements are essential here – and are the Cornerstones of our Decker Grid™ methodology:

1. Point Of View: The “So what?” of your message. Think of this as the one think you want your listener to remember.
2. Action: What do you want your listener to do with the message?
3. Benefit: What’s in it for them? How will your listener benefit as a result of taking your action?

2. Develop the Slides

There’s nothing wrong with continuous slides in a presentation. There are fabulous presentations, in the form of what I refer to as a narrated slide show. Instead of text, the slides are rich with pictures, graphs, videos and other emotively moving images to view. One great example is Al Gore presenting his slide show of An Inconvenient Truth – very powerful visuals and impact. Or the many moving illustrated lectures similar to those presented at the annual TED conference. (To create these amazing visuals, be sure to reference the pros like Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte.)
There are two other categories that are narrated slide shows, and use the design elements mentioned above, but have no personal presentation.

• They are Webinars and conference calls in business, that have to have continuous slides and voice, and the Slidecasts in the Slideshare website, which have sound with a PowerPoint. Although the design principles are the same, text and words may have to augment.
• And then there is the pure slide show, such as we see in the Slideshare website. Here the design is everything, and all the elements above have to be even more dramatic.

3. Deliver the Message

For in-person presentations, adding one new design element to the basics above makes all the difference. It’s YOU! Your energy, enthusiasm and confidence go a long way to carrying the message. You and the message are one, and your PowerPoints are visual support to your message – it is NOT the message itself.
One of the best examples of creating the communication experience is Steve Jobs at MacWorld. He is not giving a narrated slide show, he is the show, and he is using brilliantly designed PowerPoint (Keynote in this case) support to emphasize, dramatize, and otherwise create memory hooks.
The reason so few presentations are communication experiences is that people have come to believe that the PowerPoints are the presentation. They miss the power in the gestalt of both person and visual making impact on a listener – and thus influencing an audience.

Use Black Slides (For in-person presentations ONLY)
The secret sauce in design of support for the Communication Experience is to use black slides in your PowerPoints. A black slide is literally a black, blank background slide. Not a logo, not a design, but a nothing – simply a black slide.
Using the Black Slide concept will do three things:

• Black slides will enable you to clear your screen when you have finished one point and are telling a story, amplifying, adding a postscript, etc.
• Black slides will enable you to cross in front of the projector when you want to move around, own your space, and not have to have the projector awkwardly showing some text on your body.
• But most of all, Black Slides will release you from PowerPoint prison, where you create your PowerPoints and they become your presentation. If you create your content first, and then decide what your support visuals are going to be, it’s a different ball game. And the payoff is enormous.

We coached a CEO of a major risk management company, who had used PowerPoints in the typical way. He embraced the Black Slide concept. He wanted to make his presentations a Communication Experience. So when he gave his next speech at his company kickoff meeting, when he hit the clicker and the screen went black, people were looking around, saying “what happened to the projector?” After a very few minutes they got used to it. They concentrated on the CEO, focused on his message, and bought into his vision. They also told him it was his best presentation ever.

Consider your purpose. Consider design. And then go beyond the basics.

We are starting a series of blog posts called Slide Tips - exclusive articles by the world’s leading presentation and communication experts. This post by Garr Reynolds is the first in that series.
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There are no panaceas leading to effective presentation visuals, and there are no quick fixes. But when it comes to creating more effective slides that complement the spoken words of a presenter, there is one graphic design principle that can make a huge difference if applied properly: the principle of empty space.

Emptiness or empty space (also called negative space or white space) is a key component of effective graphic design in general. Yet, as Alex White points out in The Elements of Graphic Design (Allworth Press), “the single most overlooked element in visual design is emptiness.” And this lack of attention to emptiness is one of the key causes of slides that are either ugly, ineffective, or both. Most people think of empty space—if they think of it at all—only as background, the canvas behind the text and graphic elements on a slide, the trapped space in between “the content.” Emptiness on a slide is not really something to concern ourselves with most people think. But empty space is not nothing, it is a powerful something. Empty space in your visuals can breath air into your key visual elements leading to greater clarity, understanding, and augmentation of your spoken word. When you start to view empty space as a positive element you are better able to avoid clutter by eliminating the non-essential.

Learning from the world around you

You can learn a lot about the idea of using fewer elements in a visual and using empty space to amplify your graphic by observing the visual design in the world around you. It’s everywhere. You can begin to improve your design mindfulness by reading books on graphic design as well as by the careful examination of the professional graphics around you right where you live. Graphic design is ubiquitous, especially in urban settings such as New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Tokyo, etc. but you can also find examples all around you in smaller towns too. As you commute to work or during your evening walk, begin to pay attention to the designs you observe—store fronts, advertising, posters, signs of all types, print media, and on and on. Designs that make good use of empty space will have messages—with or without text—that are easy to understand. Your eye does not wander or get confused. We notice differences. Designs that make use of emptiness often have good contrast and a clear design priority. We are not usually aware of “the design” of it, but we get the message. And the message is what it’s all about.

The land of Zen simplicity and visual clutter

Some of the best graphic design treatments in the world are done right here in Japan. And some of the most chaotic and mad examples of graphic design and communication are also right here. If you have been to Japan you know exactly what I am talking about. In Japan we have a 2000 year-old culture steeped in aesthetic appreciation and tradition juxtaposed with modern, fast-paced city centers which give one the feeling of living inside a giant pinball machine. Yet the lessons are everywhere. Below is an example from inside two department stores in my home of Osaka, Japan. Product displays in a retail space may seem to have nothing to do with presentation design, however, the importance of emptiness and removal of the non-essential can reveal itself in unusual places.

Above: This was snapped while shopping in an electronics store. We were shopping for an energy-efficient stainless steel refrigerator that would fit harmoniously with our kitchen appliances. However, while the price was easy to find, it was often hard to locate even the most basic information such as the exact size or energy consumption, etc. And it was difficult to imagine how this would actually look in our kitchen with the sea of clutter pasted over the very product we wanted to see.

Above: Here is a dining table in a furniture store just down the street from the electronics store. They get it. We need to imagine how the piece will look (and feel) in our home. The specs and details are there in a small sign, easy to find without searching.

Above: Advertising posters on trains offer good lessons as well. This poster (about 70cm wide) is encouraging passengers to take a trip to Gold Coast, Australia. Some of the type is no bigger than 10 point; I had to stick my nose to the glass to even read all that detail. Yet most people who see the poster will never be close enough to read all that detail. Good poster design should (1) be noticed, (2) be understood, and (3) be remembered (and hopefully get the viewer to take action). Posters and presentation visuals are different, but slides too must be noticed (have an impact), be understood, and help audiences understand and remember your point (or story, etc.).

In defense of the designer, this poster is a classic example of design-by-committee; the actual designer probably became no more than a computer operator with the client saying “Add this!” “Don’t forget that!” “Where’s the &^*#@! koala bear?!” and so on. Sadly, this poster resembles some design-by-committee PowerPoint slides which I have seen all too often in Japan. Often the default is: When in doubt, add more. “Slide-by-committee” is responsible for a lot of really bad PowerPoint slides everywhere in the world.

Above left: A classic poster that is painfully similar to a lot of PowerPoint slides. The designers of the poster on the right showed restraint, leaving most of the space empty.

Above: A lot of billboards which feature rich full-bleed images and a bit of text remind me of some good presentation slides. The entire “canvas” is covered by the image but the use of space, lack of clutter, and a clear focal point makes the visual easy to notice and understand in an instant. This huge billboard is across the street from the Apple Store.

Above: Here in a SlideShare deck are several examples and before/after slides that use empty space. All the slides were used to complement the spoken word in live talks.

Slide Tips is a weekly series of articles by leading presentation and communication experts.
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There are SlideShare members from all over the world - in Sudan, in Hawaii, in Sydney and Helsinki. We have been noticing how many people upload slides about their cities and countries. Generally, its a bunch of pictures and some commentary. I love watching such slideshows. Many are about places I have never been, but would really like to go. Some of them are embedded below. I hope you enjoy them as well.

Of course, we have slideshows about London!

| View | Upload your own

And how we have London, and not have Paris.

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Some city slides about Jaisalmer, golden city in the north western part of India.

| View | Upload your own

These slides were shared with love from Romania

| View | Upload your own

And here is a slideshow about Berlin

| View | Upload your own

Go to this group to check out more. And if you have a city slideshow, please do share it in the City and Country Slides group on SlideShare!

Many SlideShare users are also WordPress users. In fact, SlideShare widgets are embedded into Wordpress more than into any other social network. I am constantly amazed by the enthusiasm of the Wordpress community. Joost de Valk has made it even more easy to embed SlideShare widgets into Wordpress.org. He noticed that we offer a special embed code for Wordpress.com users. His new plugin allows Wordpress.org users to use that same embed code. Just install this plugin and then you can use the Wordpress.com embed code to embed a SlideShare widget.

Dave is known for his blog (Master of 500 hats), his conference (Graphing Social and Web2.0 Expo which he is co-chairing), and most recently the Stanford Facebook App Class (10 million in 10 weeks). Some of you might also know him from his ore that he gained fame (or notreity) for his SimplyFired campaign for Simply Hired. Dave is also an avid SlideShare user (you can see them on his slidespace here: ). My favorite slideshow from ones he has shared on SlideShare and his most recent slideshow are embedded below. I am inspired by Dave’s metrics driven approach to marketing and product development and very glad to have him on board!

| View | Upload your own

| View | Upload your own

We have heard from a number of you that search is not working on the site. Thanks for letting us know. We are working on fixing it. Will post an update as soon as it gets fixed.

Thanks for your patience!

Update: 11th Dec, 23.00 hrs PST

Search is back up & running! Sorry for the trouble…it was a temporary glitch

Michael Sampson recently posted on his blog about using SlideShare to share slides privately for a conference review. We are reprinting his post below with his permission.

If you have used private sharing on SlideShare in an innovative way, please tell us about it! We are interested in your story. Add a comment below, or post to your blog and send us a link.

Michael’s post is reproduced below and here is a link to the original post.

How We Got Feedback on Slide Decks from the Advisory Board: Thanks to SlideShare.net for its Private Slide Deck Feature

Eric is back home after two weeks in Manila, with a week of that presenting at the Beyond Planning: eProductivity conference. I am yet to debrief with him on how it went, but I wanted to share something that we did in getting ready. He had about 30 unique presentations to give over the 5 days of the conference, and for the first batch of those we wanted to run the slide decks past our advisory board (we ran out of runway to do them all like this). But when there is such a diversity of topics to be covered, and a similar diversity of interest among the advisory board members, how do you decide which slide decks to send to which people? I knew in broad terms their areas of interest, but I didn’t want to limit them to just those areas if they wanted to weigh in on others. And I didn’t want to send out 20 different slide decks by email.

The solution I hit on was to set up a private, password-controlled blog under my TypePad account, and to upload all of the slide decks to SlideShare.net, ensuring that I turned on the private slide deck setting at SlideShare (a recent addition, and a fantastic one at that).

I embedded the slide deck into a blog post on the private blog, and used multiple categories on the blog post to flag the conference track (general, advanced, executive or student), the conference theme (eg, productivity methodologies, groups and teams, mindmapping, etc.), and the status of the slide deck (draft for review, or final ready to go). For example, the slide deck on how to be productive with email was flagged as “advanced track, executive track, productive email, draft for review”.

I sent out the address of the Planning Beyond Planning private blog, along with the user name and password, to the advisors, and asked them to review whatever they had interest in the moment for reviewing. For example, they could click on the “groups and teams” category in the category cloud, and see the slide decks that were available for review. They could quickly scan through the slides in the deck, thanks to the power of SlideShare, and then leave comments on the blog with recommended changes or additions. This also meant that subsequent reviewers could see the comments that others had made, and either weigh in with a “hear hear”, or give a counter perspective.

When a slide deck was presented by Eric at the conference, I updated the private blog to signal that we didn’t need any further comments–the window of opportunity had closed. This meant that I changed the status to “final ready to go”, and closed the comments on the blog post itself.

All in all, I think it worked really well, and I wouldn’t hesitate to follow this process again. And I would fully recommend that other conference advisors embrace a similar approach. Many thanks to SlideShare for the role that they played in making Eric’s conference a success!

And equally my thanks to the advisors that worked to make this such a success.
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