Presentation Zen Design

I went to a presentation by Garr Reynolds, last night. For those of you who don’t know Garr, he is the author of the international bestseller, “Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery” . He, along with others like Nancy Duarte and Cliff Atkinson, has been blazing a new approach to designing PowerPoint and Keynote slides for presentation; an approach that banishes lengthy text, data and bullet points from slides and instead uses simplicity, clarity and visual impact to reinforce what the speaker is saying.

Garr’s latest book, “Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations“, expands on the idea of a Zen design approach, marked by balance, harmony, restraint, simplicity and naturalness, and uses it to delve more deeply into the basic elements of design. While both the book and his presentation focus primarily on visual design, it struck me during his talk that all of the same principles apply equally well to the rest of a presentation.

Balance is more than visual. We need to balance the elements of our talk too. To be persuasive, we need to balance support for our opinions with a fair appraisal of their weak points, emotion with reason and abstract ideas with concrete examples.

Harmony refers to more than color or design. A harmonious speech draws on elements such as rhythm, repetition and rhyme to bind its ideas together, while eliminating discordant elements, such as a hectoring tone in a pep talk or praise delivered from a stern, hard face, that detract from the message.

Restraint is critical in slide design, but also in speech writing. One clear, on-point example will often have a stronger impact than three somewhat relevant ones, and ten proposals they will soon forget carry less weight than two or three they will remember and act on.

Simplicity is clarity, not only on the projection screen, but in your script. A simple structure is easy to follow and remember. Simple sentences give the audience’s the mental space to process your argument, rather than puzzle out your meaning. Simple vocabulary, stripped of jargon and buzzwords, forces you to say what you really mean.

Naturalness in design draws on millennia of evolution to create images that are pleasing to the eye and the brain. By the same measure, the presentation as a whole can draw on the ancient tribal traditions of the speaker at the campfire, teaching, spinning stories and laying out plans for the hunt in a conversation with the tribe.

A Zen approach to visual design creates slides that are clear, powerful and memorable. The same principles can guide us in writing and delivering a speech or presentation that is equally clear, powerful and memorable.  For just as Zen is more an approach to life than a religion, Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen is more an approach to presentation than to PowerPoint slide design.

But then, I expect he knows that.