Time was that I used to read every presentation book that came out. While I still have quite a full bookshelf on volumes dedicated to slides, I don’t always immediately rush to pick up every new book published on the subject.
But when I saw a new book called How to Design TED Worthy Presentation Slides, I was intrigued. Partly this was because this seemed to be the latest in a line of books from a rather prolific author I hadn’t heard of: Akash Karia. Akash is a professional speaker and coach, and his books have titles such as Public Speaking Mastery and How to Deliver a Great TED Talk.
Akash has mined dozens of TED talks for best practices and examples of what works best in the world of TED. (I was happy to see him make many references to one of my favorite well-designed TED Talks, Bill Gates’s Innovating to Zero.) There is nothing truly revolutionary here, and all of it has been noted and said many times before. Still, TED is the one place today where we can see a wide spectrum of presentations in similar formats, so the topic makes for very good material.
If you have read Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte and similar authors, it won’t surprise you to learn that…
- The best backgrounds are the simplest ones
- The rule of thirds works
- One should stick to one or two fonts only
- The less text, the better
- One message per slide is key
For me though, there was one lesson that while obvious serves as a nice guiding rule for all presentations. Akash urges readers to consider a single question when creating slides:
Am I including this slide to help my audience or to help myself?
It’s a nice way of phrasing the old “WIIFMA” guideline (“What’s in it for my audience?”). I like it.
While the book is well-sourced throughout (i.e. “According to the Harvard Business Review blog…”), it is not terribly well-designed. It looks like it was written in Microsoft Word and then just outputted as a PDF, pulling screengrabs of videos from the TED website. That’s a shame, because the book might have had a wider audience given a bit more attention to its own presentation.
Buy it here.
