Book Review: The Non-Designers Presentation Book

I wish I had an equally high recommendation for Robin Williams’ The Non-Designers Presentation Book as I do for PresentationZen Design. While Robin has some useful things to add to the discussion, her latest book just serves as a reminder that talented designers are not necessarily good presentation designers. I’ve often seen great graphic designers suddenly lose all their design training when they open PowerPoint. Often, when art directing traditional print designers on presentation, I’ll just say “Imagine you’re designing a billboard…” (And sometimes it even works.)

Robin is an excellent design writer (I particularly like her Robin Williams Design Workshop), but though she gives presentations often herself apparently, I found the book to be a scattered and cursory collection of thoughts and principles, oversimplified and lacking in a true understanding of the power of communication through on screen presentation.

Okay, that sounds harsh. She does have a grasp of the basics, which always bear repeating:

• Reduce, reduce, reduce your text
• Don’t be afraid of spreading your information across many slides
• Eliminate superfluous stuff
• White space is okay
• Use full screen imagery instead of wimpy small pictures
• Distribute separate detailed handouts

And she also caught my eye with a couple of interesting thoughts such as:

• Design your slides so that they make no sense on their own; make them require elaboration
• Use animation to define sections of your presentation

But overall I just feel as though Robin is way too enamored with using funky fonts; using contrast on individual slides, but not enough overall in a presentation; allowing too much repetition; and just settling too often for slides that fix the big problems, but still are way too PowerPoint-y.

The average person will definitely learn something from this book, but your time and money are much better spent reading Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte.