Ever see Steve Jobs do his MacWorld keynotes? That’s the bar. Aim for that.
- Your slides are your bullet points, not your transcript.
- Slides are visual aids. Not literary works.
- Have a separate set of notes that supplement the slides if you need more words.
- Don’t read the slides, talk about them.
- Look at your audience & talk to and with them.
Tools, Type, Tips.
- Use what you know, provided you can make your slides look at good as you can possibly make them.
- Use clear legible type. Helvetica. Open Sans.
- Simple color scheme with sufficient contrast (There’s a reason Steve Jobs used white text on really really dark backgrounds).
- Able to be read anywhere in the room.
- Use a clicker, a wireless mouse, a bluetooth touchpad – something that lets you stand where you can connect with the audience.
- Keynote, PowerPoint – these are fine. If you’re a WordPress developer, why not WordPress?
I had to do some WordPress training for a business publication. After trying Prezi, Open Office, Keynote and PowerPoint, I asked myself why I was doing this the hard way – couldn’t I just build something in WordPress? The answer was definitely yes. I wrote a theme that uses Flexslider to accomplish this. Others have written presentations for WordCamps that use different jQuery plugins.
You can also code your own! Just don’t veer into the weeds & lose site of your aim, which is to make an effective presentation.
