Can You Hear Me Up the Back?

Tips on creating presentations with personality

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The TED Commandments: lose hustle, win friends.

Mar 8, 2010 6:09pm

There’s a time and a place for a sales presentation, and conferences aren’t it. People pay good money to go to conferences. In return, they want to learn amazing new things, discover future trends, and learn how others in the same industry have solved problems. They don’t want a blatant sales hustle...

Secret Men’s Presentation Tips

Mar 4, 2010 7:24pm

Are you a man? Do you present to women? Did you know there’s a single, vital element of your presentation that you’ve probably never considered? One that’s never mentioned in the presentation tips books. And if you get it wrong, it can cancel out all the good work you’ve done with graphics, scriptwriting and...

Death of A Pitch: Lessons From Mickey Mouse Man

Feb 22, 2010 3:52am

‘Creativity is my middle name!’ Researching your audience is probably the most important element of your presentation. Doom awaits those who neglect this. Over the weekend I had dinner with another school parent, a man who built a sizable fortune from selling domestic appliances. Let’s call him Jim. He did it with decades...

Telling A Story With Numbers

Feb 16, 2010 5:55pm

If you present with numbers, you know how hard it is to bring them to life. Not all of us can be as riveting as maths lecture wizard Matthew Weathers. Here are some useful tips from Lizzie O’Leary of Bloomberg News, an organisation that faces a daily challenge of presenting endless...

New MICE.net article: Question Everything

Feb 11, 2010 4:18pm

When most companies plan an event, they’re focused on the ‘how?‘ rather than the ‘why?‘ So there are endless meetings about what brand of wine to serve, and whether the delegates should be arranged theatre style or classroom style. Where should the off-site dinner be? These are all important questions, but few...

Practice Twitter To Cut The Blather

Feb 8, 2010 6:24pm

All presenters should Twitter, to practice compressing an idea into 140 characters. More clarity, more impact. End of post. Blather....

10 Presentation Tips From Steve Jobs’ iPad Launch

Feb 3, 2010 9:32pm

Edited launch video. Full version (1hr 20min) here. Steve Jobs is rightly regarded as a master of the presentation universe. How many presentations get that level of global PR hype, both before and after the event? Here are 10 lessons to draw from the iPad launch speech: 1. Open with an attention-grabbing amazing...

Shock Study: Fonts Are Actually Really Important

Feb 1, 2010 3:44am

“Please. That font doesn’t match those shoes.” For years, people in black clothes and matching square-frame glasses have told you that font choice is important for successful communication. But how important are fonts, really? Maybe that’s just the designer’s opinion, rather than a scientifically proven fact. After all, communication is fertile territory...

Graphic Tips: Making Text Clearer On Photos

Jan 26, 2010 11:09pm

The design guys and I are working on a food packaging project at the moment. It’s quite a fiddly task. There’s a Dan Brown novel’s worth of legal mandatories to fit on each box, much of it warnings about the two greatest threats to Western civilisation: nuts and crustaceans. DANGER THIS...

Revolutionary New Touch-Screen Projector

Jan 24, 2010 5:01pm

If you’re looking for the future of presentation technology, you only need look as far as CSI Miami and its futuristic rainbow-lit headquarters. That’s where you’ll find image scanners that can query a database of all the left-handed golf gloves in Florida, and bring up a photo and address of each...