slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations | 
 enlarge | Author: Nancy Duarte
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $34.99
Buy New: $21.86
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Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 252
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 294
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9 x 8.9 x 0.6
ISBN: 0596522347
Dewey Decimal Number: 005
EAN: 9780596522346
ASIN: 0596522347
Publication Date: August 12, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
No matter where you are on the organizational ladder, the odds are high that you've delivered a high-stakes presentation to your peers, your boss, your customers, or the general public. Presentation software is one of the few tools that requires professionals to think visually on an almost daily basis. But unlike verbal skills, effective visual expression is not easy, natural, or actively taught in schools or business training programs. slide:ology fills that void.
Written by Nancy Duarte, President and CEO of Duarte Design, the firm that created the presentation for Al Gore's Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, this book is full of practical approaches to visual story development that can be applied by anyone. The book combines conceptual thinking and inspirational design, with insightful case studies from the world's leading brands. With slide:ology you'll learn to:
- Connect with specific audiences
- Turn ideas into informative graphics
- Use sketching and diagramming techniques effectively
- Create graphics that enable audiences to process information easily
- Develop truly influential presentations
- Utilize presentation technology to your advantage
Millions of presentations and billions of slides have been produced -- and most of them miss the mark. slide:ology will challenge your traditional approach to creating slides by teaching you how to be a visual thinker. And it will help your career by creating momentum for your cause.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 All there is to know for those who have already mastered PPT technical skills September 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Nancy Duarte is managing Duarte Design, a company that has created some high-profile presentations (Al Gore is one of the clients). They (her husband is the company's CFO) started out in the 80s when the Apple Macintosh brought desk top publishing and graphics design to the masses, and have now become one of the big brands in professional presentation design.
This is the perfect book for those who have mastered the PowerPoint (or Apple Keynote) technical skills and need to make the final jump to master concepts usually taught in art schools (rather than software manuals):
- Picking pleasing color schemes
- Slide composition
- Typography
- Etc.
The trained eye can extract almost everything there is to know about presentation design. However, this is not the book that will teach you magic that will turn your beginner-level PowerPoint edits into a professional presentation.
Many subjects discussed in this books are covered in other material as well (minimal bullet points, cut words, use professional images, etc. etc.) However, there are some very specific things that I picked up in this book that were new to me:
- Thinking about cinematic movement for animations or slide composition
- Creating one big map and using the PowerPoint push transition to navigate it: one presentation - one big slide
- A large library of chart concept sketches, there were many new ones I did not use before
- Stressing to adopt a "designer" mentality to presentations
Things that I found less useful/interesting (personal preference):
- (Many) direct references to the services Duarte Design can offer
- Case examples (many of which are the same as on Duarte's site) are not always useful
- The section on data charts was relatively weak
But overall, a warm recommendation to purchase this book. It is well written, nicely illustrated and brings all the presentation design essentials together in one place, including many references to further reading and almost all the big presentation "brands" in the industry.
 Print too small September 1, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I found the book interesting but with the small print, very hard to read. More theory than practical help in putting together a presentation, especially in the instructional area.
If Only All Corporate Presentations Were... August 28, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
...this slick, lively and valuable.
When it comes to bullets, some of my co-workers buy their ammunition by the case. 17 bullet points in one slide?! Yes, we can do that. 50 slides?! "Well, I wanted to make everything clear..."
I intend to slip this book onto the department library and hope its sanity spreads.
OUTSTANDING! August 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I highly recommend this book! Great tips and insights and extremely helpful. One of the best of it's kind. Wwll worth the price.
AMAZING--not about slides, about mind to mind communication August 26, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I just destroyed this book with folded pages and ink annotations, so the perfectionists out there may want to order two copies, one for eating and one for sharing. The price is phenomenally reasonable, especially for something that is all color and totally elegant.
This is not about powerpoint slides. If anything, it is a very subtle but explicit critique of how retarded they still are (e.g. no separation between bullet groups). This is an utterly inspiring combination of wisdom, education, visual excitement, and plain fun that "lives" what it preaches.
When I get back to the office I am going to read this book again while I create a briefing on the Earth Intelligence Network and educating the poor one cell call at a time that respects the deep knowledge being imparted by this author and her team. Mills Davis, visualization and semantic genius (Project10X) called my presentation "dense" yesterday, and I needed this book to understand just how polite he was being.
Bottom line mechanically: 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 font size MINIMJM. For the advanced audiences, 20 slides, 20 seconds each, 6 minutes and 20 seconds total.
I read and reread sections, and the recurring thought in my head was that this book may well be all one needs to run a semester long course on the communication of important complex ideas. The author does not just show a correct slide, the author breaks down every aspect (e.g. fonts, color, grid layouts, use of images, creating your own art) into separate chapters with very ably-illustrated palettes covering all the options. I have a note on this, "nuances are unpackaged and illustrated."
I note the author's admonition that change across the presentation is a distraction, that animation should support the message and the continuity of understanding.
For large organizations, the author covers templates as a means of harnessing the diversity of knowledge of varied functions and employees, while maintaining a consistency of brand. BRAND is huge within this book, and in this book BRAND is not a legal term, it is a philosophical term. I am hugely impressed by a chart showing UK companies that treat BRAND as a design imperative being so much more competitive and profitable than those that do not. This book is not just asserttions and demonstrations, it is fact and case based and eminently authoritative.
I learn for the first time that powerpoint slides can be instantly made to be black and white to focus audience on the speaker, or made all white, by pressing B or W. Why didn't I learn that from Microsoft? Because their tool bar is not designed to teach....perhaps?
Special pages for me:
10-11 The Presentation Ecosystem (Message, Story, Delivery)
12-13 Time Estimate for world-class presentations (36-90 hours)
18-19 Rick Justice and 27 slides on eight topics (organization)
58-59 Making Diagtrams Work Together
64-65 Following the Five Data Slide Rules (Tell the Truth is Rule 1)
82-83 The (Financial) Value of Good Design
116-117 Lose the logo on every slide....
142-143 Dissecting a font (this section alone was HUGE eye-opener)
148-149 Typesetting a block of text (what powerpoint does not do)
The references are phenomenal, and comprise an instant library for any person, firm, or school of design. I only have ten links allowed, so below I list the reference categories, and link to a single book from the multiples identified--no disrespect intended for the others!
DESIGN
Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter)
BRANDING
The Brand Gap: How to Bridge the Distance Between Business Strategy and Design
VISUAL THINKING
Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands
INFORMATION GRAPHICS
Nigel Holmes On Information Design (Working Biographies)
DATA DISPLAY
Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data
CONTENT
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
BUSINESS BOOKS
The E-Myth Manager: Why Most Managers Don't Work and What to Do About It
The index is very good, another manifestation of the utter devotion to quality of the publisher, O'Reilly (I dislike most of their book sets, this one very properly rose to a proper high level).
Lots of white space. There isn't an ounce of fat or irrelevance in this book. It is world-class in every respect, and most publishers are so crummy about price and color that I want to end with a tip of the hat to o'Reilly for getting this one "just right."
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