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Simplicity, among other things, is a conscious choice between inclusion and exclusion. Often the magic is in what you leave out. But this means that you need to be comfortable with saying no, to yourself and to others. This is not easy to do. In the two video clips below from 1997, Steve Jobs shares his ideas on simplicity and focus while speaking to the issue of killing OpenDoc (a software framew
A couple of years ago, I was asked back to the TEDxKyoto stage to give a few words regarding tips from storytelling as they relate to modern presentations. The 15-minute talk can be viewed below. The title of the talk is "10 Ways to Make Better Presentations: Lessons from Storytellers." But as I say early in the presentation, perhaps a better subtitle would be "Lessons from watching too many Pixar
A long time ago — before PowerPoint was invented — in a galaxy far, far away, leaders gave presentations backed by large electronic wall displays. Below, for example, is a photo of General Dodonna (from Star Wars IV) briefing a packed room full of starpilots, navigators, and droids. Notice how he uses the entire wide screen to display only visual information, a digital vector animation of the inne
Looking back twenty years, I had only been living in Japan a couple of months when I found myself sitting in a large Japanese bath surrounded by my naked coworkers. I was at an onsen (温泉), or Japanese hot springs, along with everyone else from my office, as part of our company weekend retreat. The purpose of the trip was not work, but simply relaxation, dining, drinking, and a little fun with coll
To learn how to design and deliver better presentations, we need to pull from many educational sources. Books are good, but which ones? I don't usually suggest PowerPoint or Keynote "how-to" books, but instead recommend reading books from various design and communication fields to stretch your knowledge and perspective. Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte is great, of course, and there are many others tha
Exposing ourselves to traditional Japanese aesthetic ideas — notions that may seem quite foreign to most of us — is a good exercise in lateral thinking, a term coined by Edward de Bono in 1967. "Lateral Thinking is for changing concepts and perception," says de Bono. Beginning to think about design by exploring the tenets of the Zen aesthetic may not be an example of Lateral Thinking in the strict
TED has earned a lot of attention over the years for many reasons, including the nature and quality of its short-form conference presentations. All presenters lucky enough to be asked to speak at TED are given 18-minute slots maximum (some are for even less time such as 3- and 6-minute slots). Some who present at TED are not used to speaking on a large stage, or are at least not used to speaking o
You never know how users will end up using your technology. Sometimes they end up using your product in creative ways that you could not possibly have thought of on your own. This is why many entrepreneurs learned to embrace the idea of "letting a thousand flowers bloom," an idea that people like Guy Kawasaki have been preaching seemingly forever. "When people use your product in an entirely new w
Jill Tarter, Director of the SETI Institute and TED Prize winner, gave a very nice presentation on SETI's mission and why it matters a few weeks ago in Long Beach. Jill could have given her speech without visuals and it still would have been good, but I think the slides really did help illustrate and illuminate her message; the visuals certainly helped her audience put things in perspective. And p
The theme at TED this year is "The Great Unveiling," and it was an unveiling of a sorts for Bill Gates when he gave an impassioned, upbeat talk to a packed hall in Long Beach Tuesday morning. But Bill was not at TED to talk about technology or Microsoft. The rebooted version of Bill Gates is all about changing the world through his own style of philanthropy. Bill is presenting with visuals much be
I picked up a book recently called Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual by Timothy Samara* that is quite good. Samara starts off his book — after a short discussion on what is meant by design and graphic design — with a list of "Twenty Rules for Making Good Design" which includes a brief but good elaboration of each of the rules. Now, as Samara points out, rules are important to understand but
As a follow-up to yesterday's post on kinetic typography, I would like to point you to several more examples. First, a clarification: my purpose in bringing up the topic of kinetic typography is not to suggest that you too should incorporate text elements in your live presentations in the same way that you see featured in the examples below and in the previous The Girl Effect example. Using apps l
We talk about play around here a lot. Remember that play was one of the six aptitudes needed to be successful in today's world featured in Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind. I often associate at least one aspect of play and playfulness with the old Buddhist idea of the beginner's mind (or child's mind). That is, in the child's mind there are infinite possibilities, but in our adult mind (one filled with
Some 17 years before The Back of the Napkin was published, and before death-by-PowerPoint was a familiar refrain, Steve Jobs was not only a master of the slide presentation, he was a clear and thoughtful presenter at the whiteboard as well. I love this old presentation below featuring Steve Jobs at the whiteboard as he methodically, yet passionately, explains NeXT's positioning and future growth o
The "Lessig Method" of presentation is not an official method per se, but many people who know about the work of Stanford law professor, Lawrence Lessig, have been inspired by his presentation style and informally refer to his approach as something unique indeed. Those who have seen Lessig present have been talking about his approach for a while. David Hornik at VentureBlog wrote a post entitled P
David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37signals shares his ideas on creating a profitable startup company in a presentation titled "The (a) secret to making money online." I was tipped off to these presentations from Startup School '08 because a reader found the online presentation of the talk noteworthy. I watched the talk initially just to see how the video works, but
Macobserver reported that Jobs's keynote Tuesday in San Francisco was not one of his "expectation-shattering presentations." They quoted Your Mac Life host Shawn King saying that "Jobs's performance seemed a little off." But as a commenter on the website said "...if Jobs had announced contact with an alien civilization, it wouldn't have 'shattered expectations.'" The downside of having a reputatio
It's been almost two years since I wrote this post comparing the approaches to presentation by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Since PowerPoint 2007 has been out quite a while now I wondered if Bill Gates' visuals and delivery have improved along with the software. So I watched this entire Bill Gates presentation recently (twice). Now, I like Bill Gates a lot. He's a nice guy and he's certainly a great
A lot of people ask me where they can get good-quality images, so I thought it would be good to have one post that I could bookmark and send out to people. I mentioned before that I use iStockphoto.com the most (as well as more expensive sites — though I do that much less now — and high-quality photo discs from Japan). A few people gave links to their favorite free or inexpensive sites as well. Be
As a follow up to yesterday's post on Bill Gates' presentation style, I thought it would be useful to examine briefly the two contrasting visual approaches employed by Gates and Jobs in their presentations while keeping key aesthetic concepts found in Zen in mind. I believe we can use many of the concepts in Zen and Zen aesthetics to help us compare their presentation visuals as well as help us im
“Brand” is one of the most overused and misunderstood terms in use today. “Branding” is perhaps even more misunderstood. Many people confuse the myriad elements of brand identity with brand or branding. PowerPoint critic Edward Tufte, for example, has referred to the simple (and admittedly annoying) act of placing logos on every PowerPoint slide as “branding,” implying that branding doesn’t go muc
PowerPoint is a great tool for displaying visuals that enhance, illustrate, and generally magnify your narrative. It’s been used effectively for years by millions of professionals from such disciplines as academia, engineering, medicine, business, education, government (mostly ineffectively in this case), design, technology, and comedy. Comedy? PowerPoint as pure comedy gold Below are a few exampl
Steve Jobs gave one of his best Macworld keynotes Tuesday in San Francisco in spite of a very minor technical glitch — a clicker problem that he recovered from well — and a seven-minute snoozefest by one of his honorable guest speakers. I've broken my comments on Steve's latest keynote into at least two post. I will not comment on the content of the presentation except to say that Steve was smart
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