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Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 658.452 EAN: 9780596522346 Format: Illustrated ISBN: 0596522347 Label: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 294 Publication Date: August 12, 2008 Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Sales Rank: 875 Studio: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Product Description: No matter where you are on the organizational ladder, the odds are high that you've delivered a high-stakes presentation to your peers, your boss, your customers, or the general public. Presentation software is one of the few tools that requires professionals to think visually on an almost daily basis. But unlike verbal skills, effective visual expression is not easy, natural, or actively taught in schools or business training programs. slide:ology fills that void.
Written by Nancy Duarte, President and CEO of Duarte Design, the firm that created the presentation for Al Gore's Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, this book is full of practical approaches to visual story development that can be applied by anyone. The book combines conceptual thinking and inspirational design, with insightful case studies from the world's leading brands. With slide:ology you'll learn to:
Connect with specific audiences
Turn ideas into informative graphics
Use sketching and diagramming techniques effectively
Create graphics that enable audiences to process information easily
Develop truly influential presentations
Utilize presentation technology to your advantage
Millions of presentations and billions of slides have been produced -- and most of them miss the mark. slide:ology will challenge your traditional approach to creating slides by teaching you how to be a visual thinker. And it will help your career by creating momentum for your cause.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - A good place to start
slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations
I enjoyed the book. It is well laid out with some really nice graphics and images to illustrate the points. The book covers basic design concepts with good examples on the do's and don'ts. I found the different iconic representations of abstract concepts in Chapter 3 particularly useful. The book is inspiring and by the time I reached the last page, I was looking forward to applying the new knowledge on my next presentation. The challenge though, would be to create amazing graphics like those in the book to inject the "wow" factor. I would have appreciated some mention on the tools used to produce the graphics in the book and how readers with no professional graphic design skills could bridge this gap.
Rating: - Emperor's New Old Clothes
I had high hopes for this book. It looks very nice. It has the right nods to Tufte early on. But...
But the true content is very thin, includes a load of chart junk (the anti-Tufte - I guess the true cue is in the title, this is a PowerPoint book) and page after page of abstract diagrams demonstrating "flow" - much like the woeful second half of "Say it with Charts" which is about 50 pages of arrows.
Very very disappointing indeed.
Rating: - Great informational and Innovative book
This book may well get me the opportunity to move into corporate america. I had an interview with a forune 50 company. Because I was able to just reference the book, my interview went over so well that the Vice President of sales gave me a favorable interview. We will see if I am able to move to the next interview process. Without this book i may well have been lost in the shuffle!!!
Rating: - Do Presentations the Right Way: To Share Ideas
Nancy Duarte, author of slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations has a wealth of resources on her Web site including articles, a blog, and extended content from her book. She cleverly adds a www symbol on some pages in the book. This sends a signal to check the book's companion site for extended content.
This great approach works well because it's visual with the green www taking little space. Thus, you don't feel like the book wastes any space to point you away from the book's pages. Some people don't care to go online -- they want their entire book within the book's pages. So it won't bother this audience.
A useful book companion site also helps market the book to those who don't have it. If they like what they see, they'll want the rest of it. Smart authors balance the print and online resource to avoid taking away from the experience of the print edition and providing bonus material that would not work in the book (videos of the presentation and downloadable PowerPoint files) while giving just enough information to those who don't own the book... yet.
Duarte refers to Sky McCloud's dynamic presentation containing 200 slides that she shows in eight minutes. Her book site includes her full presentation -- which you can't capture in the book. As a deaf person, I couldn't hear what she said. That girl's slides captivate me the whole time as they almost tell a story on their own.
What I like about these PowerPoint files is the site shows them like a movie. It also helps to watch the presentation in full first and then download the file to see its individual slides and how to make it work. Duarte provides the links referenced in the book so readers can click instead of type them.
The slick and colorful book shows how to create effective, intriguing, and visual presentations from the beginning of the process where you ask questions to know your audience better. It works through finding inspiration and coming up with the initial ideas and design.
slide:ology helps those who know all the tricks of PowerPoint, but struggle with the visual aspects of the presentation -- the art and design part. That's me. I'm a right-brain thinker who tells it like it is.
I struggle when it comes to creating and showing my thoughts with visuals. It's like when I tried to be a web designer. I knew how to do HTML, CSS, and create a site. But it was flat, lifeless, and boring.
This book blends PowerPoint and information visualization. Such visuals help tell the story. So the book covers space, typography, delivery, diagrams, color, animation, design value, and more.
Case studies appear throughout the book between creativity and design discussions. Some zoom in on a specific feature of a real presentation while others share expertise from talented speakers and executives of organizations ranging from Cisco to a church pastor.
After reading slide:ology, I believe I can step up my presentations from a design perspective. I'm a pro when it comes to text, but visuals... kaput. Since I can easily create charts, it won't take much to make them more effective with the tips from the book. I'm in no hurry to do a presentation and test out what I've learned.
The book is easy to read and reference as it uses a lot of pictures and slides. Although a lot of the text uses too small of a font size -- very surprising considering the discussion on font size.
Rating: - 100% practical!
The book is so packed with practical and pragmatic tips, it's usefull as soon as you open it. Great format to keep browsing through to find inspiration and check how you are doing on your slide deck while you work on it. Thanks for sharing the results of so many years of experience and expertise, Nancy!
- A good place to start 
- Emperor's New Old Clothes
- Great informational and Innovative book
