I’m trying to put together a powerpoint in the style of Dick Hardt’s legendary Identity 2.0 presentation at OSCON last year, but damn!, it is not easy. Here’s the link to Dick’s masterpiece.
The old laws of three bullets and a chart go right out the window when you try a presentation that has a slide per sentence and requires a carnival barker’s patter to keep it rolling.
I’ve seen one other person attempt the format — David Vivero at IDG — who got great laughs when he showed a stuffed animal in his explanation of “taxonomy, err taxidermy”, a style allegedly pioneered by Lawrence Lessig. Which reminds me, one of these days I must buy Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.
I had heard about Dick Hardt’s presentation but never actually watched it… Now I have done so, 3 times in a single day. Amazed about the quantity and quality of information this guy delivers in only 15 minutes. I made sure graphic designers here watched it… it’s just poetry in power point.
Make sure you tape your efforts with this… I’d like to see that.
Brilliant powerpoint, but I fear it’s effect. We can all expect to endure hours of Powerpoint from would be “innovators”, delivered in morse code fashion, rendering the content to indistinguishable pablum. Don’t forget to bring your magic decoder ring…you’re gonna need it.
It’s too hard to do. Trust me. We’ll endure another lifetime of people reading their bullets to us.
Glad you liked Dick’s Identity 2.0 talk 🙂 He does the presentation using Keynote on a Mac. I recommend this over PowerPoint on a PC. If you haven’t tried Keynote before, give it a try — you should find the presentation much easier to create and deliver. He also practices a ton beforehand, so that he’s able to present in such a rapidfire fashion.
Good luck!
Lori
That he practices is obvious. This is not something I imagine you want to wing.