The Mobile Presenter

File > New > Presentation: Presentation Skills for Software Developers and Other Technical Professionals by Simon Guest

As the subtitle suggests, the goal of File > New > Presentation by Simon Guest is to teach presentation skills to software developers and other technically-minded people. As someone who's spent most of his professional life in software development in one role or another and as someone who also goes to attend and speak at a lot of software conferences, I can confirm the need for help in this area. Our fellow developers are all hard-thinking, target-oriented individuals who have learned that it's important to be precise and go into a lot of detail when communicating with each other and with their computers; and so they apply these principles to their presentations as well. This form of communication, however, can get in the way when talking to customers and even more so when preparing a presentation.

I'm not a designer. Yet, in order to create (i.e. design) more effective slides, you need to be familiar with at least a few of the basic principles of design.

One example that I use (in the book as well as in the workshop) is the Rule of Thirds.

I attended FOSDEM last weekend, Europe's biggest Open Source conference. Can you imagine a largely self-organising conference that manages to somehow come up with 500(!) talks for two days? That's FOSDEM.

With so many talks to choose from, I only managed to attend a total of 10 (not counting one spontaneously organised "Birds of a Feather" session). Interestingly, I noticed one common design element on the slides of 3 of these (pretty much randomly selected) talks: A progress bar.

... is something that you should avoid, obviously. Don't be that busy speaker who delivers a mediocre presentation because you didn't have the time to prepare properly. At least that's the advice for speaking at regular conferences and similar events. You should have had enough advance warning; not using that time is usually your own fault - be it due to bad time management or over-commitment.

In some circumstances, however, having to prepare a presentation on short notice is almost the norm; in business environments, for example.

I will be giving a presentation about "Crafting more effective technical presentations" at the ACCU Conference (April 9-12, 2014) in Bristol (UK).

Here's what it's about (this is the abstract I sent in):