Product Description

These days, it's not just corporate marketing directors tasked with giving computer-based presentations—anyone forced to stand in front of a crowd and talk for more than three minutes had better know how to put together a slide presentation. You're not a professional designer, but you want your slides to look professional. What do you do?
 
Enter Robin Williams, the beloved, best-selling non-designer's designer (with over 850,000 copies of The Non-Designer's Design Book in print!) who has taught an entire generation the basics of design and typography. In The Non-Designer's Presentation Book, Robin expands upon the design principles introduced in her award-winning Non-Designer's series. She explains four fundamental principles of good design as applied to digital presentations, and adds four more principles specific to clear communication with slides.

Whether you work with a Mac or PC, PowerPoint or Keynote, let Robin guide you, in her signature, light-hearted style, through the entire process of creating a presentation—from using the right software to organizing your ideas to designing effective, beautiful slides that won't put your audience to sleep.

In this essential guide to presentation design, you'll learn:

• What makes a good presentation or a bad one
• How to plan, organize, and outline your presentation
• Four principles of designing effective presentations
• Four principles for designing beautiful slides that communicate clearly
• An exhaustive list of timeless presentation rules...that you should totally ignore

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19561 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 168 pages

From the Back Cover
In this book, Robin Williams expands upon the design principles introduced in her award-winning Non-Designer’s series. She explains four fundamental principles of good design as applied to digital presentations, and adds four more principles specific to clear  communication with slides.

Whether you work with a Mac or a PC, PowerPoint or Keynote, let Robin guide you, in her signature, light-hearted style, through the entire process of creating a presentation—from using the right software to organizing your ideas to designing effective, beautiful  slides that won’t put your audience to sleep.

In this essential guide to presentation design, you’ll learn:

• What makes a good presentation or a bad one
• How to plan, organize, and outline your presentation
• Four principles for developing effective presentations
• Four principles for designing beautiful slides that communicate clearly
• Specific tips for charts, graphs, animation, and video
• An exhaustive list of timeless presentation rules . . . that you should totally ignore 

About the Author
Robin Williams is the author of dozens of best-selling and award-winning books, including The Non-Designer’s Design Book, Robin Williams Design Workshop, The Little Mac Book, and so many more. Through her writing, teaching,  and seminars, Robin has educated and influenced an entire generation of  computer users in the areas of design, typography, the Mac, and the web.

Customer Reviews

Robin's wisdom applied to presentations - perfect!
I have two of Robin's other books, which have been influential in my amateur efforts at work designing flyers, proposals and presentations.

My presentations have evolved considerably since discovering Garr Reynolds work (Presentation Zen), which is superb, and I was looking forward to this title from Robin to provide me with new ideas and more options beyond Reynolds' 'zen' approach.

Robin's conversational and lighthearted writing style makes this an easy read, and she also packs the book with great content. It's full colour throughout, which was pretty much essential given the subject matter.

As with her other titles, she gives loads of before and after examples, and the book closes with a quiz chapter asking the reader to identify what's right or wrong with various slide decks, which really hones the eye and forces an understanding of the core principles.

In this book, she applies the four principles from 'The Non-Designers Design Book' (Contrast, Repitition, Alignment and Proximity) in the context of presentation design. If you already have that book, this will be a great refresher and deepen your understanding of the application of these principles to slide design. If you haven't read that book, this will be a great introduction to the principles and will provide you with a fantastic toolkit to instantly improve your slide design (you should also get her Non-Designers Design Book for a great primer on typography).

Where the book really stands out though is Robin's inclusion of chapters on preparation, clarity of message, plot/storytelling and great insights into better use of the software (screenshots and instructions for PowerPoint and Keynote). This book is the full package - great graphic design advice, tips to help you control your software (rather than it controlling you with auto templates, etc) and help with planning and delivering your overall message.

I enjoyed the section on 'Ignore These Rules' where Robin has a friendly dig at the presentation gurus who command us to "Never use animation" or "No more than six words on a slide". She's realistic and down-to-earth enough to realise that, sometimes, a little animation is good or that you can read aloud the text on a slide - as long as everything you're doing is HELPING to get the message across.

Nice chapter on handouts and a 15% discount voucher from istockphoto.com at the back.

All in all, great stuff. Buy it and make your presentations stand out!