The Mobile Presenter

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.

The list of changes for the recently released Keynote 1.7 for iOS includes words to the effect that it now seems possible to import themes into Keynote. This makes it sound like you are no longer restricted to the 12 default themes that Keynote for iOS ships with.

As it turns out, this new feature is not quite what you think it is ...

I get this question a lot: I'm giving a 60 minute presentation. How many slides should I use? There is of course no right answer to this. In fact, it's the wrong question to ask.

In her book, The Non-Designers Presentation Book, author Robin Williams argues that a presentation should start with an introduction into the topic, like the preface in a book. [I]t's the foreplay before you start reading. We enjoy that process., she writes.

I happen to disagree with this advice. Actually, I've stopped reading forewords in books. They usually only tell me how important the topic is or how great the author is. I'm not interested in this any more. I already bought the book; just take me to the content already!

15 Minutes Including Q&A: A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentations by Joey Asher

This book is strictly aimed at business presentations. For those, the approach must seem pretty radical: Your presentation should take no longer than seven minutes - the rest (of the 15 minutes) is for Q&A.

The author proposes a rather rigid format for those presentations. That's necessary, so that you can keep that time limit and also as a guideline for the presenter to cope with the requirements of this approach.