Category Archives: Storytelling

Resonate: Multimedia Version

Well, she’s done it again.

Nancy Duarte continues to innovate and show people how storytelling, visual communication and presentation should be done.

I have written about my admiration for her second book, Resonate, before. It is the first and only true in-depth analysis of successful presentation construction that I know of, and it is a perfect companion Slide:ology, her first book that I often give out to people who are serious about becoming better presenters. Nancy has long been interested in bringing her books to life in an appropriately multimedia format, and she has now converted Resonate into a highly interactive HTML5 online edition.

And perhaps the most amazing part is that she is making this edition absolutely free. You can also get it as an interactive iBook, also for free.

Did I mention that Nancy is literally giving away one of the best written and produced presentation books around for free? Yes, you can spend money and buy it from Amazon, but then you don’t get all the interactive and multimedia features which include Nancy herself bringing much of the text to life.

Seriously, just go here and start reading this afternoon…

FacebooktwitterlinkedinFacebooktwitterlinkedin
Categories: Printed Information, Storytelling, Visual Thinking.

Zimmerman Prosecutors Use Kindergarten-like PowerPoint Slides as Closing Remarks

Holy crap. If there’s anything that says, “incompetent, careless prosecution,” it’s the juvenile and horribly created PowerPoint slides that the Zimmerman prosecutors used in their closing arguments. There’s not much point in redesigning these or explaning the utter fail these are in terms of effective communication and persuasion. They pretty much speak for themselves.

Why not just bring your 6 year old in to deliver closing arguments for you?

Full set of slides here.

 

FacebooktwitterlinkedinFacebooktwitterlinkedin
Categories: PowerPoint, Presenting Live, Storytelling.

What Business Pitches and Sex Have in Common

What do business pitching and sex have in common? Well with certain exceptions, not a whole lot of people get to see you engage in either of them. Really, how do you stack up against the competition in the boardroom? (Or bedroom for that matter.)

You might have seen Facebook’s original ad sales deck from 2004 which is a fascinating archeological find.

But Business Insider seems able to get their hands on VC pitch decks fairly often, and I’m always interested to see how big and not so big names actually pitch and design their slides.

Here’s a recent one from Buffer, a social media startup. What it lacks in design and visual storytelling, it makes up for in simplicity and clarity.

 

And this 18 slide deck from Dwolla netted the founders $16.5 million in startup funds.

 

And finally, take a look at AirBnB’s investor pitch deck. Not bad…except for the incorrectly sized data bubbles…

 

FacebooktwitterlinkedinFacebooktwitterlinkedin
Categories: Pitching, PowerPoint, Presenting Live, Simplicity, Storytelling.

Visual Storytelling in Citizen Kane via Presentation Zen

Garry Reynolds has a repost of a really nice analysis of some of Orson Welles’s visual storytelling techniques in Citizen Kane.

Check it out.

And if you want a fantastic read on Welles’s early life and his storytelling in the theatre and on radio, pick up Simon Callow’s Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu. My favorite story from the book involves Welles’s WPA production of Macbeth. In order to achieve deep perspective on stage for a battle sequence, he hired very short actors to stand far upstage with spears. 

FacebooktwitterlinkedinFacebooktwitterlinkedin
Categories: Storytelling.

Businessweek’s Racist Visual Storytelling

Businessweek has produced some excellent cover designs, but they are rightfully being pilloried right now for this current cover that is so over the top, misguided and overtly racist that I hardly know where to begin.

The thing that most strikes me about the cover is that the visual story the cover tells is is one that could never in this day and age be written with words inside the magazine.

A little context: The cover story inside the magazine is about a new housing boom in Phoenix. It’s a fairly non-controversial piece about home builders, house flippers, short sales, real estate agents and people who found themselves underwater with their mortgages. Apparently, things are on the rebound in Phoenix and prices are again rising after the housing bubble of a few years ago. But the cover makes no reference to the Phoenix housing market or players; it instead portrays a popular, but fallacious view of the housing bubble that blames the entire market meltdown on greedy, low-income home buyers who took advantage of the banks through fraudalent loan applications. It’s a storyline popular in certain circles that absolves the banking and loan industries and portrays them as victims with no responsibility for reckless behavior that crashed the economy.

While borrowers were not completely blameless, pinning the entire economic crisis on minority home buyers is a storyline that Businessweek could never have gotten away with, because the facts are simply not there. They have too much credibility to even try to go there with their writing.

But this is a story that was all too easy tell visually—which they did with this outrageous cover.

I really can’t comprehend how this cover made it past even one employee let alone past editors and publishers and all the way to print. But it did…and in the 21st century, not the 19th.

FacebooktwitterlinkedinFacebooktwitterlinkedin
Categories: Imagery, Storytelling, Visual Thinking.
visual training presentation