The Mobile Presenter

One of the problems that you'll encounter when doing more visual presentations is that people are going to ask for your slides; yet your slides are pretty much useless for them without your narration. I've noticed that this makes some people - especially technically minded ones - suspicious of the whole concept of more visual slides in the first place.

As presenters, we operate in a pretty safe and static environment: There's usually a screen (and a wall!) behind us while the audience is in front of us, seated.

But there are other types of presentations that are much more challenging. Like presenting in the streets. Which is what city guides do.

Lately, I found myself mostly giving short presentations - 5 or 15 minutes long. Not surprisingly, it's really hard to give a good, consistent, and informative talk in such a short amount of time.

If you need help to get started here, have a look at the example of insightful short talks: TED talks. Garr Reynolds has a useful list of tips on how to prepare a good TED (or TED-style) talk.

But what do you do when your presentation turns out to be too long? How can you make it shorter without losing all that precious content?

As speakers, we are used to stand in front of a screen that shows our slides. The details may vary slightly, e.g. whether you can or can not actually stand in front of it without casting a shadow, but the general setup is usually the same.

But sometimes, you come across some rather odd setups. For example, have you ever had to present in front of 3 screens?

I wrote a guest post for CTOvision last week, on why we need to reconsider how we do technical presentations. I'm happy to see that it seems to have resonated with quite a few people. Thanks for all the comments, tweets, etc. :)

Now, it does usually take me 2 hours to explain how to do "better" presentations. So instead of trying to cram that into 800 words, I decided to be somewhat provocative in order to get people to think about how they approach preparing their own presentations.

Inevitably, some people who do know a bit more about the topic chimed in and some seem to have taken it the wrong way. As one person on Twitter put it, 20 slides of memes and poor photos don't make for a good presentation.