Book Review: The Naked Presenter

Recently, I was exchanging email with a colleague on the subject of presentations when he brought up Nancy Duarte's books, which I'd read some time ago, and given a positive review to at least one of them. One of the books that came up was Garr Reynolds Presentation Zen, which I'd also liked. It turned out he had a more recent book out, The Naked Presenter, and so I decided to give it a read.

It's okay, but I can't recommend it as highly as his previous book or Duarte's. The book focuses more on the "Zen" aspects of approaching presentation preparation and delivery, and less on the actual mechanics of those things themselves.

This would be well enough, but I found many of the techniques to be high level and vapid compared to other works, and the metaphors to all things Japanese felt forced.

Like many of the more recent "pretty books" (Duarte's and Reynolds' both fall in this camp), the content is so blown out in favor of whitespace, quotes, and pretty pictures, that it's pretty devoid of content. What's there is not beyond what's already covered in the original book. It does try to get into the whole zen-mental-state thing, on approaching prep, on delivery, on handling a hostile audience, etc, but only superficially. I'd have liked to see some approaches to drills or to methods of rehearsal and the like.

In summary, the book is alright, but I'd recommend Duarte's Resonate or Reynolds' Presentation Zen over this book. If you like Reynolds' other book a lot, then you may enjoy this one.

The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides (Voices That Matter)

In-game PPT: Raising the bar on presentations

Just back from Paris GDC, and while there was a number of cool things there, my favorite was the keynote given by the guys at Media Molecule, makers of Little Big Planet.

You can find plenty of summaries of their talk online. No need to rehash here.

What I did want to note though, is that they seriously raised the bar for those of us looking to given good, unique, presentations.

Rather than using Powerpoint, their entire presentation was done as an in-game level, which they "played through" as they gave their talk. Different videos and pix were brought up by leaping onto trigger switches, levers and buttons were used to trigger animated actions supporting the talk, etc.

It was just beautiful.

Maybe I'll give my next talk in Line Rider!

Ignite Portland

I attended the second Ignite Portland tonight. Adam and I went down to the beautiful Bagdad Theatre and just barely made it in to the standing-room only (750+ capacity) venue before the locked it down and turned a ton of people away.

I hadn't been to an Ignite event before but was turned onto it by my friend Rob when he gave a talk at Ignite Seattle. From previous event agendas, I expected more tech & entrepreneurial stuff. There was some of that, but there was a mix of everything from that to explanations of why Germans love David Hasselhoff.

It was very entertaining. I'll definitely try to attend again. I'm also going to try to present there as well. I find the restrictive format (20 slides, 15 seconds each, auto-timed) to be an interesting constraint to work in.

A good thing about the event was that while the presentations varied in quality, none of them was very poor. They ranged from fair to excellent - which is far better than I expected.

The only complaint I have is that the intros and housekeeping - done by those that put the event together - were just crap. (A) They should have been done in the same 15-slide Ignite format, (B) they spent too much time stating the obvious (e.g. the 15-slide/5 minute format was stated multiple times, "They sell beer here" - ya we get it), and (c) most important of all - it should have been HIGH ENERGY!

Anyhow, forgive the venting. I really think they did a good job of pulling the event together, but it was disappointing on the kickoff and quickly recovered.

Are bullet points the new hem length?

Some time ago, Guy Kawasaki blogged about SlideShare, a web startup for sharing/storing presentations, and a contest they were having to judge the best presentations.

The contest winners were announced, and they are worth looking at.

A few thoughts:

• These of course aren't presentations at all. They are slide decks. Presentation materials. Minus the speaker, they aren't exactly 'presented'. That being said, I think the site/service is interesting. It would also be interesting if they supported posting video/audio of a talk along with the deck, or perhaps a transcript (like I described in my presentation-related post a while back).
• Most of the presentations subscribe to the very image-heavy, minimal-text style used by Lawrence Lessig, Steve Jobs, and others (more on this here). The judges of this contest, like me, beleive this to be a 'winning' style of presentation. I do wonder though, if we are collectively blinded by the fact that its just plain different than what we are used to seeing. Is this the optimal solution, or are presentation styles just that... styles. Will text quantity vary with trend? And if so, as I asked in the title of this post, are bullet points the new hem length?
• [It would be interesting to ask Seth Godin, who himself favors this style of presentation, what he things a 'purple cow' presentation looks like when all presentations look like purple cows :-)]

Those comments aside, some thoughts on the specific contest-winning 'presentations':

• "Shift Happens" is a great example of using visuals to give facts some punch.
• "Meet Henry" is a great story-telling, single message sales pitch.
• While a little text-heavier than the others, "Unlocking Cool" uses some 'big font' slides to drive key points home (Slide twelve's "Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast" slide is a great example)

In any case, there are some good lessons to be learned here. The site is worth bookmarking.

GDC 2007: Post-mortem on my sessions

I sat on two panels, and also gave a sponsored session. Here's my thoughts on each and the results thereof.

Console/PC Distribution Gatekeepers

I sat on this panel moderated by Simon Carless. Other panelists included people from Sony,
Manifesto games, and Gametap. There was supposed to be someone from Nintendo but he backed out. The panel got covered here, here, and here, and if interested, you can buy an audio transcript here.

I think I did OK, though I gave pretty middle-of-the-road answers. Panels are more entertaining when provocative, and several people afterward picked up on the fact that I failed to bite on some obvious opportunities to stir things up a bit (e.g. I've griped about GameTap before). This was a case where I felt I was more "the Microsoft guy" on the panel, rather than just "kim pallister", and so had to take the high (less-risky-but-less-entertaining) road. Oh well.

I do think I acheived the goal of letting the indie games track attendees better understand how to get their titles on Xbox Live Arcade and MSN Games, which was the main reason I was there. We had a few hundred people in the room and I was swamped by about 20 people afterward with questions about just that.

I give myself a B+.

Casual Games and Windows Vista: The Real Story on What It Means For Casual Games

This was a sponsored session braindump on Vista, Games explorer, GDF files, etc, etc, from the perspective of casual games. Very much along the lines of what my Q&A with the IGDA Casual Games SIG Quarterly covered.

The session got covered at Josh Bancroft's blog (Intel bloggers? WTF? when did that happen. bully for them).

This type of session is a brain dump and while you can try to convey the information in an engaging manner, it's never quite as fun to give as a more creative presentation (see my post about my MIGS06 presentation for more on this).

While I think I helped some attendees, and had some positive feedback after the talk, I still give myself a B- on this one.

Sharing Control

This panel was moderated by David Edery, a co-worker of mine. However, he wasn't a coworker at the time he set up the panel and invited me. I certainly had less business being on the panel than the others up there (Raph Koster, Ray Muzyka, Matt Brown...), but pinged David about it when he was putting together the panel because at the time we were working on the details around hosting Cranium's Pop5 game - a web-based casual game featuring user-created content.

So, I was about to contribute and I think I got some positive reaction out of the audience and brought a different perspective to the table. I was happy with it overall. I give myself an A-.

The highlight for me was that I used my MIGS05 UGC anecdote, and the guy that gave the Mona Lisa comment at the MIGS session was in the audience for this panel and came up afterward to point out that he was the guy. Cool!

The session got covered here.

Visualization Porn

I'm probably the last peron on the internets to link to this Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. (originally seen, I think, on BoingBoing)

I agree with Seth Godin's thoughts on it:

"I love the spectacular use of technology on this web page. I hate the twisted use of the periodic table (because the relationships between the types isn't natural or elegant the way chemicals are) but it's worth it, because it will certainly inspire you to figure out how to get out of your text rut."

After reading it, you can kind of grok why they placed things in the rows/columns they did, but it doesn't intuitively leap off the page as to why they are related. Feels like some were kind of 'plugged into leftover spots'.