The Do:ology of Slide:ology

Earlier I raised the issue about THE HOW IS MISSING from recently published books on presentation slide design. The comments riffing off the post were great with some passionately arguing for presenters to hire graphic designers to create their presentation slides.

Paul Williams, from the Idea Sandbox business/blog, is someone I respect immensely for his PowerPoint prowess. (Back-in-the-day, Paul and I were the go-to folks within the Starbucks marketing department for PowerPoint tips. Part of our shtick was to go from cubicle-to-cubicle sharing PowerPoint MakeOver advice.)

Paul read my post on THE HOW IS MISSING and decided to recreate the AFTER slide example you see below.

image from slide:ology (O'Reilly)

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It should be noted, Paul only used tools available in PowerPoint to do his slide recreation. As you’ll read, this wasn’t an easy task … even for an PowerPoint pro like Paul. Kudos to Paul for doing the Do:ology of Slide:ology.

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PAUL WILLIAMS: For grins I tried to recreate the slide you used in the example in your post about the slide:ology book. It took me just over 38 minutes to create. I only used the shapes provided in PowerPoint. (I had to use white blocks to mask certain parts to match the look of the original slide).

DOWNLOAD SLIDE (.ppt)

I consider myself an advanced to expert PPT person and this was a big challenge... and my version still looks like crap compared to what appeared in the book.

I do have access to Illustrator and it would have gone faster for me if I had used that. But I wanted to keep it in PPT.

(I do have access to Apple Keynote and it would have taken me just as long, I'm sure. This is not a PPT vs. Keynote issue).

What's not fair is that there are all sorts of custom shapes and shading and stuff in the book illustration that are not part of PPT.

So, it took me 38 minutes to simply make a copy of what existed... The only "creativity" I used was figuring out how to bend PPT to my will...

To have produced this slide originally, you'd have to first have to create the concept of placing a yellow "person" on a curved stage with curved backdrops... THAT is truly the hardest part.

Comments

[Jay Ehret]

Well, 38 minutes creation time per slide would definitely reduce the number of slides per presentation. Maybe that's not bad.

[johnmoore (from Brand Autopsy)]

Jay ... one difference to note ... what takes Paul 38-minutes to do on PowerPoint would take most people 3x longer to do. In this case, that's about 3 hours for one slide. Yowza.

[David Linke]

Yowza...I think that translates as "not going to happen!"

I doubt that most people whacking together a "200X Sales Strategy" presentation or "Highlights of 200Y" have that much time nor patience for 3 hours per slide.

I think the "death" of the bullet point may have been a bit premature. Bullet points should be killed off, just need a replacement to powerpoint.

[Steven Hoober]

Um... how is this not a ppt vs. keynote argument? Cause keynote will accept vector PDF data. Then, you can get perfect rendering without mussing with the stupid, low-velocity tyro toolset in either program.

I too have done many presentations for executives, most in powerpoint, and far too much actually drawing with PPT tools. Done it. Still totally unacceptable, and despite my good record improving design otherwise, powerpoint is so very bad I've gotten nowhere improving presentations aside from actually handing out templates, widgets and my business card to actually do the work.

[Jan Schultink]

Impressive 38 minutes of PPT.

I did enjoy reading slide:ology a lot and learned a lot from it.

This slide however is an example of one that could have been solved without Adobe Illustrator-like graphics. The 3D is not required here to make a point that 2 factors combined deliver superior results.