Book Review: slide:ology

"slide:ology" is a recent release by Nancy Duarte of Duarte Designs - one of the worlds leading presentation design firms. Her team put together the presentation for Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth".
It's a beautifully designed book, as one might expect.

Title: "slide:ology"

Author: Nancy Duarte
Genre: Business, Communication, Design, Presentation

Summary: The book is subtitled "The art and science of creating great presentations". I would be more comfortable summarizing it as "the art of creating great presentation graphics".

Favorite Quotes:

• "Data slides are not really about the data. They are about the meaning of the data."
• "To succeed as a presenter, you must think like a designer."
• "Help them see what you're saying."

Strengths:

• I love the mindmapped 'Acknowledgments' page!
• There's a great section on conceptual diagrams.
• Plenty of case studies and 'before and after' examples.
• Some fantastic suggestions for creating powerful movement in your slides.

Weaknesses:

• Audience Analysis again gets the short end of the stick (4 pages out of 275). I haven't found a book yet that really addressed audience analysis properly.
• There is quite a bit of information that would be considered esoteric by most business presenters (color wheels are one example)

Conclusion: Easily the best book available on slide design. Be aware that this book focuses more on visual presentation skills than on personal presentation skills. If that's what you're looking for (and trust me, you should be - I've seen your presentations or ones like them) then this book will definitely help you.

I'll be attending a seminar at Duarte Design tomorrow to practice these principles. I'll let you know how it goes!

Post-it Flags: 10 flags

* Each time I find an interesting quote, model, image, or idea in a book, I mark it with a Post-it flag. The more flags, the more value I found in the book.