Don't Let The Experts Tell You Powerpoint Sucks!

I was really excited to listen to this Webinar, so much so that I forgot to do my blog while listening (which I usually do). Since Dorothy sent us the link to Tom Kuhlman's blog I've spent a lot of time perusing it as well as other people's sites (Garr Reynolds - Presentation Zen, TED Presentations) and borrowing design books. I think the ideas are great and I'm getting inspired but I have to self-edit before I drive myself crazy with too many ideas :). So this morning's Webinar complimented his blog. The main takeaways for me:

Think blank canvas - move away from thinking of PowerPoint in terms of bullets and images, you can be totally creative with a blank canvas
Create your own images - breakdown images into simple shapes that can be reconstructed in PowerPoint
Seek out inspiration - from other people, blogs, gurus. Tom pulls down the TED presentations and watches one every now and then to see what ideas he can pull
There are a lot of communities that discuss these topics. I was amazed by the 500+ people who attended this session, most of whom were IDs. There are so many people designing training and PowerPoint is a useful tool to do that.
White space, white space, white space - don't be afraid of it, use it liberally
Slide count does not matter - it's better to have more slides with the information broken down then to jam it all onto one slide
New resources - we'll be purchasing some books to stock our library (Presentation Zen, Non-Designer's Presentation book

Session Information (you need to sign-in to view archive): Ellumniate Event
Tom's resource page: Rapid e-Learning Blog Post

Dorothy's add-on to Christy's blog post.

Comments

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