A twenty-first century presentation is a presentation that has been designed to capture an audience’s attention. A presentation that delivers a strong, simple message in the shortest possible time using whatever medium works best for that particular message.
Over the next few weeks, I shall be writing a number of posts on the subject of presentation design and how to create a twenty-first century presentation design.
I have decided to do this because it has occurred to me that nobody is ever taught how to design a slide for the 21 century. Instead, most presentations created follow the default PowerPoint setup. This is not only ugly, it also damages the impact of your message because from the very first slide, your audience are hit by the overwhelming feeling of boredom and complexity of a 1990s style presentation.
Before we begin, let us define what a twenty-first century presentation is.
Since the turn of the century in 1999, we have seen the incredible rise of digital devices. Mobile phones have become more advanced. In fact so advanced, they are now called ‘smart phones’. Many millions of people are using tablets to consume their news and read their books, and this is done on trains and buses as well as airplanes. Almost everywhere we look now we are confronted with digital moving images and text.
A consequence of this change is our attention-span has decreased. We are no longer able to concentrate on one thing for any long period of time, we are constantly distracted. We are distracted by beeps, alarms and moving images on a poster outside the window. We a distracted by the constant attention for our time by other people, ringing telephones, email and text messages that demand our immediate attention.
What does this mean for the humble presentation? It means that the default, non-designed format many people use to deliver their presentations worldwide just cannot compete for your audience’s attention. Most presentations begin with an introductory slide that is so uninspiring that the audience immediately begins tweeting or facebooking. Before you even begin, your presentation has failed.
So a twenty-first century presentation is a presentation that has been designed to capture an audience’s attention. A presentation that delivers a strong, simple message in the shortest possible time using whatever medium works best for that particular message.
The first part of this series follows this post.