The Mobile Presenter

Imposing restrictions can often make things more interesting. When it comes to presentations, one such example is Pecha Kucha. The idea behind this format is that a speaker only gets to show 20 slides - and that the slides are moving forward automatically after 20 seconds. So all in all, you have 6:40 minutes for your entire presentation.

I've read about Pecha Kucha but hadn't seen it live until a few weeks ago, when I attended a Pecha Kucha night in Stuttgart. It was very interesting to see how the 10 speakers dealt with the restrictions.

It seems to be a bit of a trend right now and I also catch myself doing it on occasion: Having a slide with only a photo on it - but no words.

When you talk to people about embracing a more visual slide design, some get it - and some only embrace it half-heartedly. The latter group often ends up producing slides that have a somewhat relevant photo on the right - and a list of bullet points on the left side. People in the other group sometimes tend to go to the other extreme and start using slides that only consist of photos - with no text at all.

Neither of these approaches is ideal.

FrOSCon is one of my favourite conferences. It is a small-ish but very well organised conference held in Sankt Augustin (near Bonn, Germany). As an open source conference, it is full of nerds and geeks who are all very passionate about their respective topic. Like most conferences, it is also full of bullet point-laden slides that stand in stark contrast to the passion of the speakers in front of them. So I thought I'd try and introduce some of them to the Presentation Zen way of presenting in a workshop custom-made for this target audience, called "Presenting for Geeks".

I try to speak at several events each year. In addition to my favourite conferences, I'm always looking for Calls for Papers from other interesting events. However, there's one thing that has always bothered me about the typical CfP ...

As speakers slowly come to realize the power of using strong visuals in their presentation slides, the issue of giving proper credits comes up. Most of the time, you will be using someone else's photos, so of course you should be making sure that you are using those photos under a proper license, i.e. either pay for the right to use it or comply with the photo's license, e.g. a Creative Commons license. With the latter, a lot of people seem to think that giving credit to the photographer means that they actually have to put the name inside the photo or at least on the same slide.