Presentation Project 1

This notes is summerized from Roger Darlington, Gar Reynolds and Mihai Budiu Blogs. I use ICT Project for GCSE book (R.S.U. Heathcote) as a reference.

How To Make A Good Presentation

Well, it is not complicated to make a good presentation. You just have to make a detail plan and imagine the audience responses. As Mihai said that human attentions is very limited, so don't cram too much information, either in each slide or in the whole talk.
There are 5 point that you have to pay attention :

1. Organization

• Have a very clear introduction, to motivate what you do and to present the problem you want to solve. The introduction is not technical in nature, but strategic (i.e. why this problem, big idea).
• Use only one idea per slide.

• Have a good conclusions slide: put there the main ideas, the ones you really want people to remember. Use only one "conclusions" slide. The conclusion slide should be the last one.
• If you have to present many different things, try to build a unifying thread.
• Try to cut out as much as possible; less is better.
• Help the audience understand where you are going.

2. Mechanics

• Good looks are important.
• Humor is very useful; prepare a couple of puns and jokes beforehand (but not epic jokes, which require complicated setup). However, if you're not good with jokes, better avoid them altogether. Improvising humor is very dangerous.
• The more you rehearse the talk, the better it will be.
• The more people criticize your talk (during practice), the better it will be; pay attention to criticism, not necessarily to all suggestions, but try to see what and why people misunderstood your ideas.
• Not everything has to be written down.
• Be enthusiastic.
• Act your talk: explain, ask rhetorical questions, act surprised, etc.
• Give people time to think about the important facts by slowing down, or even stopping for a moment.
• Do not go overtime under any circumstance.

3. Text

• Slides should have short titles.
• Use uniform capitalization rules.
• All the text on one slide should have the same structure.
• Put very little text on a slide.
• Don't use small fonts.
• Do not put useless graphics on each slide: logos, grids, affiliations, etc.
• A spelling mistake is an attention magnet.

4. Illustration

• Use suggestive graphical illustrations as much as possible.
• Do not put in the figures details you will not mention explicitly.
• Do not "waste" information by using unnecessary colors.
• A few real photos related to your subject look very cool (e.g. real system, hardware, screen-shots, automatically generated figures, etc.).
• For some strange reason, rectangles with shadows seem to look much better than without (especially if there are just a few in the figure).
• Sometimes a matte pastel background looks much better than a white one.
• Exploit animation with restraint. Do not use fancy animation effects if not necessary.
• Use strong colors for important stuff, pastel colors for the unimportant.
• Encode information cleverly: e.g. make arrow widths showing flows proportional to the flow capacity.
• Use thick lines in drawings (e.g. 1 1/2 points or more).

5. Result

• Don't put useless information in result graphs (e.g. the 100% bar for each application).
• Label very clearly the axes of the graphs.
• Discuss the results numbers in detail; "milk" them as much as possible.

This is for example :

The problem with this slide is that the clip-art used does not reinforce the statistic, nor does it even fit the theme of women in the Japanese labor market. The background is a tired, overused PowerPoint template. The text is difficult to read. And as one trainee commented: "it's ugly."




You can present the same information with a better slide like these examples. Using different color in precentage, pie chart or write the sentence as a heading.