Of course I'm always looking for ways to improve my presentations. What approaches and resources can you recommend for crafting presentation slides — and for crafting effective presentations in general?
Update: Garret Vreeland points me to his presentation tips, accumulated over years of speaker support. Face it: the guy who has to watch you night after night probably has a pretty good sense of what works and what doesn't.
AN UPDATE TO THIS POST: Rebecca Blood points to this advice by Garret Vreeland. There are a million here's how to present pieces on the web, and this is the most frank, lucid, and absolutely spot-on set of counsel I've Read More
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Beyond Bullets http://www.beyondbullets.com is quite popular but is focused on PowerPoint. I'm also not so sure about being too strict on following Cliff Atkinson's approach on most presentations I do. It's definitely worth looking into though.
Currently, I prefer Garr Reynold's blog, Presentation Zen http://www.presentationzen.com/ which is much cooler, less prescriptive, and generally has a nicer aesthetic.
Good advice, that. Something I didn't note is that we prefer to pass around a handout that serves as the lasting artifact (and which is written with real-life prose!) of the speech or presentation, and have the slides only serve as signposts (reminders of what we're talking about ... useful if it's a long list, speech, etc.) or as ways of augmenting the emotional content.
Lean and clean, that's the way.