Presentation Zen

This has nothing to do with England.

I hate bad PowerPoint. Wait, that sentence might be too long. I hate PowerPoint. This is a passion of mine. I go to enough conferences and presentations (as I'm sure you have too) where the presenter is using PowerPoint as a note-card for himself rather than as a means of visually augmenting an oral presentation for the audience. If you know me well, you know that this is a hot button topic of mine.

I don't know if you've followed it, but there is a link on the side of my blog to a graphic designer's blog on presentation creation. This is probably the best website out there for thinking about the visual aspects of a presentation. I have a fairly long list of other great websites and articles for giving and writing technical papers and presentations, but I think Presentation Zen does the best job of making me think about the visuals in a completely different way. Every time I have to sit down to work out a new presentation, I read a few Presentation Zen posts to get into the right frame of mind.

If you haven't followed the link yet, do so now, and watch the "Chicken, Chicken, Chicken" video. I've seen it twice, and I can't stop laughing. It is like nearly every bad dissertation/technical presentation rolled into one great mockery. It's brilliant. The Matlab generated plots of cluster analysis. The citations in the introduction. The blocked out outline. It is indicative of exactly how many of us learned to do technical presentations, that turns out to be just plain wrong.

I'd like to embed a classic image of a New Yorker cartoon. But they are actually pretty vigilant about copyright, so I've linked to it instead. What the heck, buy a tee-shirt while you're there.