What Qualifies as a Good Presentation?

I received an e-mail from Citrix earlier today and one of the stories in the newsletter was about this recently concluded contest on Slideshare. In case you didn’t know about Slideshare, it’s this PowerPoint version of YouTube that anyone can post their high-tech, fancy designed presentations on and people can comment. The interface looks pretty much the same as YouTube, but then again, it’s not that hard to bastardize anything to mirror its look & feel, right?

Anyways, I thought this was interesting that some of the judges included renowned Apple Evangelist Guy Kawasaki and Jerry Weissman – the “world’s number one corporate presentation coach”.

However, you can view the finalists and the presentation winners by clicking here. Once you’ve looked at these presentations, you might be a little weary about using Keynote or PowerPoint to create your next business presentation – these could possibly put all your best work to shame…

In the e-mail I received from Citrix, here are some top observations from the presentation gurus:

1. Most use very large font sizes
2. Lots of color contrast – often a dark background with light text
3. Graphic images are big and simple – generally just one per slide
4. Each presentation tells a story
5. Images help tell the story – often critical to understanding the text
6. Text isn’t in the same place on every slide
7. Text is minimal – often just a few words per slide
8. “Down style� or regular sentences more common than headlines
9. Text and images are static, don’t scoot around the page
10. Slides don’t need audio to be understood (not always a good thing – people need a reason to listen to you, the speaker)