The Mobile Presenter

Meetings tend to always have the same length - an hour, usually. But is there a reason for this, other than tradition and the default setting in organiser software? Why not schedule a meeting to only take 22 minutes? It's the same with presentations. Why do they have to take an hour? Why not 15 minutes including Q&A?

When you are asked to give a presentation, have you considered a format other than the usual hour? How long do you really need to cover your topic? Don't feel obliged to fill an hour when it would only take you 20 minutes to discuss your main point. Adding content that's not strictly relevant - just so that you can fill a timeslot - won't make your presentation any better or more memorable; quite the contrary actually.

Here's a tip when designing your slides: Stay away from the edges. By which I mean that you shouldn't put anything important near the four edges (left, right, top or bottom) of the slide as it may be cut off when the slide is projected.

You've probably seen them, too: Slides that have a photo on the right - and a list of bullet points on the left. They're neither fish nor fowl - slides that are halfway there, but that indicate that the presenter couldn't quite let go of bullet points yet.

These sorts of slides are both good and bad news.

When trying to explain that there is a better way to do presentations, people often agree - only to find excuses why they are not doing it that way (yet). The 3 most common excuses I keep hearing are:

1. I don't have the time
2. I can't use photos for this topic
3. My audience wants numbers

I attend and speak at a lot of tech conferences. Over time, I noticed that some presentations work better than others. This triggered me to look into the theory behind presentations, especially since nobody ever told me how to do it - I was only copying what everybody else seemed to be doing.

Eventually, I came across Garr Reynolds and his Presentation Zen approach. These days, you can see more and more highly visual presentations, obviously inspired by the Presentation Zen approach, being given at conferences - but mostly for keynotes and other non-technical talks.

The typical tech talk in 2012, however, is still dominated by bullet points. But it doesn't have to be this way. Part of the motivation for the blog you're reading was to help spread the message There is a better way to do presentations! to the tech and geek communities, which led to the "Presenting for Geeks" workshops, which led to "Presenting for Geeks" - The Ebook.

So I am very happy to announce that my first ebook, Presenting for Geeks, is now available.

Update 2026: At this point, all my ebooks are only available via Tolino.