Starting off the second half of Damian Conway’s presentation titled “Presentation Aikido” with visual style. Again, it’s about simplicity, using shadows and underlining and whatnot subtly. He’s done shadowing so subtly that we can’t even see it. Clearly one needs to check monitors and projectors before doing a presentation. :-) Luckily his second example worked, although I don’t really care for his choice of colours (yellow on green).

Which transitions nicely into colour schemes. Contrast is essential. Contrast is essential. Contrast is essential. There are many tools that allow you to generate complementary colour schemes: use them. Keep in mind that about 10% of the population has some difficulty with colour perception, so don’t use colour as a tool for discriminating between different texts, use brightness instead (or maybe different fonts). There’s a tool at vischeck.com that one can use to view webpages under different types of colour impairment.

It’s essential to keep people interested, so every so often surprise your audience. Tell them a story, use examples, make comparisons, change your pace and style (but don’t change your pace just for the sake of it). And every so often, give your staircases landings to give people a chance to digest what they’re injesting. You can also use those landings to let people know that a new topic is coming up, to keep the audience oriented with the flow of the presentation.

“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” He’s talking about transitions. Make them smooth and elegant, and use the obvious transitions in special occasions, possibly when you come to a “landing.” And for the love of Pete, don’t use transitions between slides, either fade in or just switch to the next one. Don’t zoom in, don’t do cube rotation, don’t do any of that rot.

Don’t use architecture charts. I’ve been guilty of this, and nearly every presentation I’ve seen has one. “Show a chart, lose an entire audience.” If the audience needs to know it, put it in the notes. Ditto for graphs.

If you’re going to put your name and title on your slides (which isn’t a bad idea), make them subtle and ignorable so they don’t interfere with the information on your slides. Lose the logo from each slide, because putting the logo on is distracting and it makes you look like a salesperson. If you have to have a logo because of corporate policy, watermark it.

Moving on to presentation, make it look effortless. Make it look like you’re on TV so your audience doesn’t feel pity for you. That’s something that’s learned and comes with practice. Make it look easy, even if the actual material is difficult, because the audience wants it to look easy and not threatening. And be yourself, but be yourself-less. The presentation isn’t about you, it’s about your material. You’re a conduit for relaying the information to the audience.

“Don’t be paralyzed by the butterflies.” Use your nervousness and turn it into nervous energy. Rituals can help you focus, get you into the same groove. Rituals can be anything, but as long as it takes you back to the familiar it’s good, it’s less frightening. He recommends not ignoring the audience before doing your presentation, but if you talk with someone, talk about them instead of yourself.

Have a backup plan. Always carry backups of your material. Conway’s a little anal about backups (he says “sophisticated”), with five backups in five different locations, but it works for him. It may only save you once, but that’s enough.

Dress how your audience expects you to dress. If you’re a CEO, dress like a CEO. If you’re a hacker, dress like a hacker.

Don’t read your presentation. The audience is perfectly capable of reading the presentation, they don’t need it read for them. Unless you’re reading to 2-year olds, of course. To do this, make sure you rehearse your presentation, and rehearse it aloud. You can have a cheat sheet, but it’s not the script, it’s a list of points you are going to make.

Demonstrations beat descriptions, because it’s easier for the audience to get the point. Make sure that your demonstrations work, though, and make sure that you’ve got local copies of your demos, if they normally live on the Internet somewhere. Use IO::Prompt if at all possible.

Use a microphone, drink water, and make a pitstop before you start. Watch the time, and make sure you stick to your intended schedule.

For handling questions, have a policy. Don’t just take questions randomly, decide where and when and if you’ll take questions, and let the audience know about this policy. When you answer questions, repeat the question and try to paraphrase it. If you don’t know the answer, don’t fake it, say something clever instead like “I don’t know the answer,” or try to redirect the question to someone who might know the answer.

And try to do presentations fairly often. Even if they’re not formal presentations, there are many situations you can use to improve your skills. “The only way to speak better is to speak.”

[link to first half]

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]