Comments on: Review of the 3 books of the Presentation Revolution

By: Janine

Janine — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 05:18:59 +0000

You have shed a ray of snsiuhne into the forum. Thanks!

By: Olivia Mitchell

Olivia Mitchell — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:32:28 +0000

Thanks for your comments and sorry for my delay in replying as I was overseas.

@DaveG and Jonathan. It’s very interesting to read your comments on the Beyond Bullets book. I too find the “one method to rule them all” a little restrictive. And I think the strength of the other two books is the focus on graphic design. If us non-designers are going to be creating visual powerpoint slides then we need design guidance so that the audience have something pleasing to look at.

By: Dave Garbutt

Dave Garbutt — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 19:45:28 +0000

Hi,

I have the first two (ie not slide:ology). BPP has some things to say but phew is it tough to read! I in fact stopped reading about half way because of the drearyness and repetition of the writing.

It really could be explained in about 20 pages. That would leave more space for designs and worked examples of turning fuzzy slide shows into stories. As said by others the classical story structure is a good start but you shouldn’t force your story to that shape just because that’s how hollywood movies are.
That I found irritating too – saying at the start that Aristotle proposed the three act structure – but then always referring to Hollywood as the brand.

But if you want help with how to structure and build a story there is certainly some there.

DaveG

By: Jonathan Gullery

Jonathan Gullery — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 01:58:15 +0000

I also have all three books. BBP (new edition) is the most dense, and really pushes a specific method. That’s fine if you totally love the method. Presentation Zen and Slide:ology leave the method up to you, and give you lots of ammo to help get your act together, along with numerous examples.
BBP seems a bit old-school, but its huge, engaging, one TON of information, but you do have to buy in to the method.
Nancy Duarte’s breadth of research is astounding to me, and I’ve learned (and continue to learn) a great deal from this book. Personal gripe (as a designer) is that over one tenth of this 270+ page book is taken up with red chapter opener pages, which gets tired after chapter one. Whatever the clever design reason for putting these in, they seem like nothing more than a way to pump up the page count. Some of the stuff is going to go right over the heads of non-designers, I think. But… really packed full of insight, wisdom, beyond-clever tips that just go right to the heart of creating good material.
Presentation Zen gets my vote though. I love this book. It offers much of the same wisdom as Slide:ology, but without some of the more technical design stuff, like pages and pages of diagram examples, stage blocking (?), color wheels etc. Garr gets where corporate graphics are at, and tactfully skewers Powerpoint tackiness.
All three have been incredibly helpful to me, all three have different strengths, and while Presentation Zen comes out tops, I am beyond grateful to read, read and re-read Nancy Duarte’s carefully-crafted book.

By: Alexis B

Alexis B — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 08:55:24 +0000

One thing you can mention is that Beyond Bullet Points is referred by Presentation Zen and slide:ology when talking about “what to put my my slides?”

For me (as I have the 3), I really see Presentation Zen as a referential of best practices that refers to other resources (Beyond Bullet Points but also others).
And if slide:ology was published before Presntation zen, I’m sure that Garr Reynolds would have referred to it (as he included an interview of Nancy Duarte in his book).
Thus, I think Presentation Zen alone is good but it is better combined with other resources, like Beyond Bullet Points for organizing contents (and find an easy method to create good presentations) and slide:ology for finding and creating visuals