How to do an agenda slide like Garr Reynolds

Garr Reynolds’ slides from his recent webcast are now online. Garr has an innovative agenda slide. He’s transformed what is normally a boring bullet-point slide into something beautiful and effective. Check out slides 7 to 12 for the agenda slide sequence:

Here’s what I like about it:

1. It’s a visual representation of the presentation timeline. I can see how much time is going to be spent on each section of the presentation.
2. It reinforces the main theme of the presentation. I can immediately grasp that the most important part of the presentation is “How design thinking can help”.  Garr uses both size and colour to achieve this.
3. It looks beautiful. Notice in particular the trademark Garr colour scheme – varying shades of the same colour plus one stand-out colour for the most important section.
4. It’s an elegant solution. Horizontal timelines are intuitive but it’s sometimes difficult to fit the words in horizontally. By putting some above and and some below the line Garr has elegantly solved this problem.

It’s easy to make an agenda slide like this. Create one for your next presentation and your audience will find it both innovative and useful.

UPDATE: Ellen Finkelstein has posted a fantastic step-by-step tutorial on how to create this agenda slide. See “Create a timeline agenda in PresentationZen style”.

Related posts:

1. The top four things I learnt from Garr Reynolds’ workshop
2. Here’s a quick way to make over a bullet-point slide
3. The Top 7 PowerPoint slide designs
4. PowerPoint slide design – the basics
5. The lost art of notes

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