Slide:ology - Quite possibly the best book ever written on presentation design.

I met Nancy Duarte many years ago. We were both working for agencies that supported Apple. I was at Web Associates as a strategic account manager, and Nancy was at the company that has her name above the door - Duarte Design. We took a few meetings together, explored ways that our companies could work together, and even had dinner with her family at their home. More recently I stopped by her office to chat about emerging media, and her new way of building teams and planning the future of her business. She had mentioned that she wanted to be sure that everything was ready before her agency was moved into a more visible market role. Kinda cryptic, right?

About a year or so later Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth began to make the world stop and take notice about the issue of Global Warming. We also noticed the work of Duarte Design for the first time on a global scale. Nancy’s team worked with Al Gore on the presentation deck he used, the one that won him a couple of Academy Awards as well as The Nobel Prize. And with that, the world of presentation design changed overnight.

And then Nancy wrote the book. Slide:ology is without a doubt the best book written about presentation design. In fact, it is so much more than that. Sure, she talks about the “tools” and the “techniques” as do many authors in this space. She also talks about the passion, and the art and the truth and all those other things that make a presentation great! Her book examines not only the “hows”, but the “whys” through a series of case studies and first hand knowledge from working with some of the most compelling presenters in the world.

As I mentioned in my video piece - just go buy it. If you read this blog, at some point in your career you will be required to make a presentation deck. This book will show you how to do it well. As for me, I am a month or so away from beginning to re-examine how we present at MediaTrust and I can’t wait to tear our slide deck apart and utilize the things I have learned from Slide:ology.

Here are the links I promised - Click here to go to the blog post about Nancy’s work with Guy Kawasaki, and click here to purchase the book from Amazon. Enjoy the read. Trust me, you will become excited about presentations again, especially your own.