Good Presentation Design
Most of my career, a good presentation design came in the form of a PowerPoint slideshow. The better ones showed better use of colors, font size and style, consistent alignment, and dynamic gestures, and or embedded videos. However, a good presentation is one that involves the audience to take an active interest; to present questions, counter-points, and personal experience. The audience is the key stakeholder and judge on how well a presentation was designed, for without them, what good is the presentation?
I conceive a presentation to be of good design when I personally can draw the audience in as if I were telling a suspenseful story, or a story that builds up to a heightened climax. In a class I took to be a better speaker, I learned that the presence of self, attitude, professionalism, eagerness, motivation, and a mastery of the subject can create a positive flow of energy between the presenter and the audience without ever seeing a slideshow, or props.
Combining a well thought out, multimedia presentation, with a slow, paced confident story directly relevant to the subject of the presentation, can make for a good design, if it was appropriate for the audience. If a member of the audience is deaf, and another is blind, they both should still be able to enjoy the same presentation and come to relatively the same conclusion as to what the presentation was about.
I recall during my first few years in the Teams, a Knowledge Management Instructor was presenting a class to us on what it means to be an effective Master Training Specialist. While he used a PowerPoint slideshow, he always faced the audience, asked open ended questions to spark discussion, presented multiple stories, and told relevant jokes. The PowerPoint he used was not distracting, but showed relational information by color-coding, using contrasts, and incorporating clear bold text. The slideshow was clean, simple and organized. The instructor used embedded videos to use as a dynamic example of what the preceding discussion was about. This method really made the point clear.
In my future presentation designs, I will endeavor to utilize Reynold's (2016) four key findings in using multimedia effectively, such as narration with pictures, and graphics without extraneous materials (Multimedia Effect, and Redundancy, Coherence, and Modality Principle), and look to incorporate meaningful, and relevant stories. In the end, it is not only about conveying information, but sparking the imagination.
References
Reynolds, G. (2016). Presentation zen: How to design and deliver presentations like a pro. Retrieved from http://www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation/pdf/presentation_tips.pdf
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