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Metablogging via Chris: An interesting topic that keeps haunting me: "How to create the optimal presentation". Must be because of my job :)

Brat's idea to use a completely blank (black) template to have nothing in your presentation that could distract your audience is an interesting, but rather krass approach. I remember a speech by Don Box where the only slides he uses were pitch black images with single XML tags on them. In Don's case this was quite powerful (as his speech circled around XML anyway ;) ), but I wouldn't have the guts to do this.

Chris on the other hand votes for using good graphics in your presentation, giving your audience a visual "anchor" to the things you say - and by doing that points to a very interesting, free image gallery: stock.xchng. Thanks for this, Chris!

So, do I agree with Chris? Not completely. I saw good uses of graphics in the form of images / photos in presentations, but I also saw lots of pictures / photos added to slide decks for humorous or "mind-anchoring" purposes that were hardly related to the topic presented (not in any of Chris' presentations, anyway)...

Is there such a great difference if you split a slide packed with bullet points into two slides with less bullet points each but some added photos of some remotely related visual representation? I am not that convinced.

My personal recipe is to dump the bullet-point-slides if possible and replace them with a graphical diagram / flow / representation of what the bullets tried to communicate in the first place - during the presentation I am going to "say" the content of the bullet points anyway, so I don't want people to pre-read them overhead, causing them to stop listening to me - I'd rather have them see a schematic representation of the coherences I am talking about. A sample here of my most recent deck of my newest technology-crush: "Services For Unix 3.5":

Of course this takes some time to create, but I find the audience reacts very well to slides like these. Btw if you want to have a look at the full deck, you can find it here - you'll see that I still got far too many bullet-point-slides in there!