I first saw Melinda Seckington’s blog post about the art of slide design on her blog. I had meant to reply with a blog post but never quite finished the blog post. Luckily during the run up to Mozfest, Mel was due to redo her talk. Mel is lovely friend and it was great to see her and Cristiano again.
The talk gives practical tips, focusing on making it stick in an increasingly busy and complex ecosystem which Mel picks up in the cogative load slide. Basically how do you make people give a crap and not forget once the presentation is over? Something more people should think about but don’t.
Over the last few decades, its become clear one of the best ways is storytelling. Humans are attuned to storytelling from a very early age. This is something Nancy Duarte has down in practice and in many decades of experience. Duarte’s TED talk about storytelling is the key for me.
Love to hear/see where Mel goes next… I’m sure shes planning a follow up to this great talk..
On a side point… while talking about slides and meme transfer
It’s also interesting to see where people are sharing slides too. I’ve always used Slideshare.net which is part of linkedin group, mainly because I can reference one single slide, makes the whole deck available and it does automatic textual export. But I do find speakerdeck.com interesting and I quite like slides.com after a few speakers used it during Mozfest.
I would like to use something more web like but its a pain presenting using html5+js when not using your own laptop. Google Slides is good but not perfect. Like to see something better not just in decoration/aesthetics (looking at you Keynote) but more web native (do not say prezi) which can automatically adapt between presentations, web viewing and notes. It would also allow for a longer lifestyle than just the slides its self. For example sometimes I have added the youtube link of me talking to the end of a slideshares. Bit kludgy but it at least links the two together.
