Presentation Design: World's Best Presentation Competition Is Live
Do you have a contender for the world's best presentation wasting away on your hard drive, or floating around in your imagination? If so, you could stand to win both acclaim and some great prizes by entering the SlideShare World's Best Presentation competition.
SlideShare has grown to be a popular place for the online sharing of PowerPoint presentations, and while it is not without its detractors - those who claim that a presentation is more than the sum of its slides - it can prove very interesting to see what other people are doing with their slideshows.
The competition has a board of judges made up of some of the world's biggest experts on presentation design and delivery - Guy Kawasaki, Bert Decker, Garr Reynolds and Jerry Weissman. Further to that, SlideShare users will be voting on their favorite presentation, the winner of which will be awarded the People's Choice prize.
With a top prize of a top-of-the-range Alienware laptop, preloaded with Windows Vista, and other prizes for both runners up and the winners of the People's Choice award, there is more than just prestige to make it worth submitting your PowerPoint decks.
So how do you go about winning?
One of the key words here is going to be contextualization. Good PowerPoint decks are only part of a presentation, and are ideally clutter free, profoundly visual, and often minimal affairs. That can make them difficult to translate to an audio-free destination like SlideShare, where the slides have to stand up for themselves.
To make that easier on both you and the people that are going to be making the big decisions, Slideshare make a key recommendation in the competition details:
""While uploading the presentation file, you should tell us something about it in the description section. This will give the voters and judges some context as to your presentation.
Specifically, tell us which of the below options describes how your presentation was or is meant to be used. "PowerPoint Deck as Leave Behind" OR "In Person Presentation Support" OR "Both" OR "Other".''
This being the case you should have every bit as much chance at winning with a visual, text-lite presentation as you would with a more self-contained, perhaps text-rich file. As it is also possible to create a slide-by-slide transcript, this is perfectly possible. Given the propensity for judges like Garr Reynolds to accentuate the importance of visual story telling over text and bullet points, it would most probably work in your favor to take this approach.
There are some great examples of interesting visual approaches to presentation design already in evidence at the competition site, and I have reproduced a couple of my favorites below. Note how the slides tell a simple story, and play a supporting role to the transcript of the presentation - a far more effective approach than trying to cram endless bullet points into each slide.
Be sure to click through to the full presentation to see how the slides interact with the speaker's transcript. Here we have a simple visual theme that creates a consistant look and feel for the presentation using real world media. No one says that just because you are using PowerPoint you have to use PowerPoint templates or design features.
In this second example, we see how effectively visual messages can be at reinforcing the overall communication goals of the presentation. In this case the slides are all essential to the presentation working effectively - there is no surplus, no dead weight being carried by the other material.
But maybe you have something even better up your sleeve? If so, be sure to enter it to the competition, which will run from March 19th until April 23rd, 2007.
Of course, should you enjoy our own Robin Good's entry to the competition, which is jam-packed with advice for setting up and making a living from your own blog, your votes would be more than welcome!
Best of luck with your own entries!
posted by
Michael Pick
on Friday, March 23 2007
Tuesday, January 15 2008
URL of this article:
http://masterview.ikonosnewmedia.com/2007/03/23/presentation_design_worlds_best_presentation.htm
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