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 Nancy Duarte is the author of slide:ology The art and science of creating great presentations, published by O'Reilly.
First, a little about Nancy. She is considered one of the top presentation designers around, perhaps the top designer. Her company, Duarte Design, does presentations for companies such as Adobe, Cisco, Google, and Hewlett-Packard and worked on Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." She attends PowerPoint Live, the annual PowerPoint conference, each year, which is where I met her.
After reading slide:ology, I asked Nancy a few questions. Here are her answers.
EllenFinkelstein.com: You've put so much into this book! It has a lot more content and examples than any other design book I've seen. It must have been a lot of work! I'd love to understand why you decided to write such a complete book on the topic.
Answer: We’ve been serving presentations as a niche for over 20 years and it dawned on me one day that if anyone was qualified to write the defining standard of visual business communications, it was me. I was encouraged and cajoled into writing the book by a friend of mine, Garr Reynolds, who wrote the only other full-color book on the market focused on presentations called PresentationZen. As you know, writing books is demanding, slide:ology took over two years and at least 3000 hours. Even though the final product looks simple and clean, it was a tremendous amount of work. I hadn’t anticipated how much work it was going to take to produce what I envisioned.
EllenFinkelstein.com: To my mind, the content of the book exemplifies the perfectionism that you obviously put into your work. It describes a method that involves lots of time, including research, idea-generation, organization, collaboration, design, and rehearsal. It seems to me that you're a head above the crowd, and I'm wondering if your experience has shown that others can, or will, put in as much time and thought as you do.
Answer: That’s a good question and one that I get asked a lot. If you have a quick briefing with your team or peers, quick presentations are fine. In fact, you can put tons of text on a slide and distribute it as a document for the team to read and then meet about it. What’s sadly broken is when people try to close a huge deal, or deliver a high-stakes presentation without spending an appropriate amount of time thinking about the audience and rehearsing their content. High effort yields high results, low effort yields low results. It’s all about how important the results are to you.
EllenFinkelstein.com: I've read some comments on-line about the book from other presentation designers, and they love the book, especially the fact that it's so design- and concept-oriented. I know that you say that anyone can draw, but how do you think non-designers who need to create presentations on their own will react to the book? Another way to put this is, what was your intended audience?
Answer: Most professionals have had to crack open a presentation application, this book is for them. Anyone who wants to work their way up on the corporate ladder, needs to be an effective presenter and communicator. This book will help them convey their ideas in a way that’s meaningful and human.
EllenFinkelstein.com: I really loved the diagrams you showed in Chapter 3 -- about a million more than I would have ever been able to come up with. I think these would be very useful for non-designers. Is there a chance of you creating a library of them in WMF format, so people can insert them into PowerPoint?
Answer: We will eventually. Don’t be surprised if you see them trickle out some day.
EllenFinkelstein.com: You mentioned to me by e-mail that you'll be doing Web seminars. Can you talk about those?
Answer: We have developed several seminar formats. We have an all-day workshop at our shop that uses sticky notes, glue, colored pens and no computer. People leave with a new outline for their presentation and a new mindset towards slides. Now we’re building webinar content that’ll be a sub-set of that material. We’ve already delivered a couple webinars for VizThink and O’Reilly that were so well received, we will be hosting more next year.
EllenFinkelstein.com: Anything else that you'd like to say? (My 4,600 subscribers are interested in all aspects of presenting and PowerPoint.)
Answer: On one extreme, presentations get a bad rap and are despised much of the time. The other extreme is Mr. Gore traversing the globe with a slide show under his arm that sparked one of the greatest movements of our time. If you put the brain power, will power and create meaningful presentations, you can change your world!
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