canspice.org

I don’t give presentations all that often, but when I do I generally tend to get nervous and flustered and do all the bad things that you’re not supposed to do to give a good presentation. When I saw that Damian Conway was giving a tutorial at OSCON 2005 titled Presentation Aikido, I was jazzed. Conway always does a good talk, and a presentation about giving presentations was just too good to pass up.

20 minutes in and the main point seems to be “be confident.” To be confident you need to know your material beforehand and know it well. If you don’t know it well then you’ll be up there giving a presentation, stumbling all over the place. You need to prepare your presentation and notes beforehand and practice it. You need to talk about what you care about.

You should take quite a bit of time to come up with your presentation. Conway suggested 10 hours of prep for each hour of presentation. 20:1 if you’ve got something relatively tough. He said for this three hour tutorial he took 80 hours to come up with it, and was still fiddling with it the night before.

Oh, and you need to be entertaining: “Entertaining always trumps informative.” Tell a story. Even if it’s made up, it’ll keep the audience interested and keep the presentation topic grounded in reality. Use metaphors, but use good metaphors: “I’ve never considered time as a non-renewable resource.”

Sidenote: This must be a good presentation because in a room full of geeks only a handful have their laptops out, and there are only two or three typing. End sidenote.

You should have five major points that the listener is going to take away with them. Humans don’t have a very big buffer so any more information than this will just leak out of their ears.

He’s currently making the point that presentation is more important than the information: “having great information on a shoddy-looking slide is actually worse than shoddy information on a great-looking slide.” I agree with his point, but for the most part I think he should be making the point that simplicity is more important than attacking the user with graphics. Actually, it looks like he is, but doing so in a bit of a roundabout fashion instead of outright saying it.

Yes, he is promoting simplicity. For presentation style, don’t use the Microsoft standard PowerPoint templates. “Steal from the cool kids: Apple, Bang & Olufsen, The Perl Journal… no substance, but lots of style.” For fonts, don’t use many. Give each font a meaning: italics for headings, classic serif for content, fixed width for code. Don’t use Papyrus (it’s overused) or Comic Sans (it looks amateurish). If you use images, use them meaningfully and in moderation, “like seasoning.” Ditto for animations, but use them even more sparingly: “if I can’t do it easily with the limited facilities in PowerPoint, it’s probably too complex to bother with.” Ditto for video, but use video even less often than animations.

We’re now at the half-way point. Time to get some coffee.

[link to second half]