My new Bing slide deck

View more presentations from Steve Clayton.

I love PowerPoint and I hate PowerPoint. It’s a brilliant tool for aiding communication but too many people use it as a crutch. They fill their slides with bullet after bullet that is there to help them not their audience. The trick is you shouldn’t be up there presenting if you need a crutch. You ought to be passionate and knowledgeable enough about your topic not to need the crutch. Garr Reynolds can tell you all about it and his Naked Presentations handout is a great resource.

What’s my point? My point is I learnt this quite a while back through hard personal experience. Because of that, I now go out of my way to try to produce better slides. Slides that gets people’s attention; slides that don’t bore the sh*t out of people. Your audience deserves it. Occasionally I get asked to help put together some slides for an even and I usually spend way more time on this than people may guess. I start out with a list of word. One word per slide. The I go find an image that represents that word. It’s not exactly unique as I’ve seen a tonne of people use this format – everyone from Seth Godin to Adrian Newey. It turns out to be a  great way to break down the message or story you want to tell by thinking what is the one word that encapsulates each slide. That leaves you to tell the story rather than having the whole thing on a slide full of bullets.

The slide deck above is one I put together for an internal client last week and struggled for a while with how to put it together…in fact for hours until the wee hours of the morning. Then I saw a slide from a Steve Ballmer presentation and the idea to include a Bing search box hit me. It would provide a new look, a cue for the presenter and crucially help people who saw the deck later on without the benefit of the presenter delivering it. The last point is probably the main failing of the “single image” format I’ve used a lot of.

So there you have it….what I hope is a simple and elegant hybrid of bullets (the Bing box) with images to deliver a powerful message. Oh…the powerful message bit is 99.9% down to the presenter by the way.

Let me know what you think and if you’re a Softie, drop me an email (stevecla) if you’d like a copy of the slides with an editable Bing box as it took some time to get that right with transparent images etc