Advanced Presentations by Design: Creating Communication that Drives Action (Paperback)

~ Andrew Abela (Author)
Key Phrases: visual presentation elements, conference room style, ballroom style, Extreme Presentation, Bad Example, Edward Tufte (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Advanced Presentations by Design overturns much of the conventional wisdom and practice for creating presentations. Based on over 200 research studies from the fields of communication, marketing, psychology, multimedia, and law, it provides fact-based answers to critical questions about presentation design, including how to adapt your presentation to different audience personality preferences, what role your data should play and how much of it you need, how to turn your data into a story, and how to design persuasive yet comprehensible visual layouts.

From the Back Cover

If you've ever wondered why your presentations do not get enough of your audience to act on what you present, then spend 20 minutes with this book.

Advanced Presentations by Design overturns much of the conventional wisdom and practice for creating presentations. Based on over 200 research studies from the fields of communication, marketing, psychology, multimedia, and law, it provides fact-based answers to critical questions about presentation design. The book shows how to adapt your presentation to different audience personality preferences, what role your data should play and how much of it you need, how to turn your data into a story, and how to design persuasive yet comprehensible visual layouts.

All this is delivered via the succinct 10-step Extreme Presentation method, which has been field-tested extensively in leading corporations such as Microsoft, Kimberly-Clark, eBay, ExxonMobil, HJ Heinz, and Motorola. Advanced Presentations by Design takes you, step by step, from a stack of information to a finished presentation that will compel your audience to take action.

Expert Praise for Advanced Presentations by Design

"Advanced Presentations by Design is the best researched book on presentation design that I've ever had the privilege of reading. I recommend it for those of you who want the confidence of knowing how best to plan and design successful presentations."
—Gene Zelazny, author, Say It With Charts and Say It With Presentations

"This book is essential for any executive who doesn't have time to wade through sixty-page PowerPoint decks. You will want to make this book required reading for all your staff."
—Stew McHie, Global Brand Manager, ExxonMobil

"Like much of what goes on inside organizations, those ubiquitous presentations have a look and feel based more on custom and what others do than on the evidence of what works best. In this practical and evidence-based book, Dr. Abela has outlined a set of principles that will make your presentations more memorable and persuasive."
—Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor, Stanford Business School, and coauthor, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management

The Author

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Pfeiffer (September 22, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0787996599
• ISBN-13: 978-0787996598
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #189,980 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Practical How-To Guide To Planning and Developing Compelling Presentations, January 16, 2009

By	August Jackson "http://www.augustjackson.net" (Sterling, VA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Professor Abela has compiled a step-by-step guide to how to plan and deliver compelling presentations. Let me dissect that praise:

* Plan: Professor Abela walks you through the important questions you need to consider before you open up PowerPoint and begin pulling your slides together. This includes analyzing your audience, enumerating your objectives for the presentation and establishing a story structure through which you can marshall and convey your evidence. This is far and away the best framework of the many I have seen for pre-design work. The great thing about Professor Abela's framework for planning is that the framework is just as useful for meetings and speeches in which you will not be speaking to slides. Clearly the objectives, story and evidence are more important than the content of your PowerPoint slides. Wouldn't it be great to have a way forward if you are left with only 5 of your scheduled 30 minutes to present or the projector breaks down? Use Professor Abela's planning framework and you'll be ready.

* Deliver: Not all venues are alike, and Professor Abela takes the best of Tufte and other visualization experts to lay out guidance for designing presentations for a ballroom and a boardroom setting. Abela provides workable guidelines for using charts and layout to visually augment your message. This book includes a number of standard charts that easily and clearly represent the basic concept you are trying to convey on each slide. As much as I enjoy Tufte, Abela's book gave me direct actionable guidance that I needed to augment my spoken message with visual evidence.

Recently I applied the "Extreme Presentations" methods to a talk at a professional conference. The presentation itself (ballroom style) stood out as more visually informative than the standard corporate fare delivered by the other presenters. More important, though, is that I had clearly mapped out the change in mindset that I wanted to see in my audience. I had properly structured my talk to marshall the appropriate evidence in sequence and make the case successfully. As I created my problem-solution and anecdote outline I actually became excited for the opportunity to make my case to my audience. Following the presentation several attendees approached me to comment that I had changed their mind on the critical insight that was my goal.

Using "Extreme Presentations" to create a presentation takes longer than the standard corporate presentation (at least my first presentations developed in this model have taken longer). The quality of the visuals and the reception by the audience really does deliver a worthy return on that time investment. It's clear to my audiences that I've taken the time to think about them, consider their interests and taken care to create a good-looking and relevant set of visuals. This quality makes it clear to my audiences that I care about them, and that goes a long way towards making the audience care about what I am communicating.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great addition to a 'presentations' library., May 24, 2009

By	D. P. Moran "David Moran" (Brisbane, Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Other reviewers have commented on the book's contentsand layout.

I am very interested in Dr Abela's distinction between Ballroom and Conference Room presentations. I believe that there is a fundamental difference between the two and that other books focus far too much on the Ballroom style presentations.

I think it is also important to note that this is published for training and HR professionals, another area not examined as fully in other presentations books.

Finally the bibliography and annotation of research into the effectiveness of certain aspects of presenting is comprehensive and up-to-date.

An excellent resource together with Dr Abela's website.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A different book about presentations, September 27, 2008

By	Carlos Cruz "Carlos Pereira da Cruz" (Estarreja, Portugal) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I just finished this book and I think it was a very good investment of my time and money.
I think it is a very different book because:
* It is very well supported, it has an admiring list of references about research made on all sorts of ideas and rules of thumb regarding presentations;
* It help us think deeply about the objectives of a presentation (before this book, most of the time, when I thought about objectives I came out with a list of things to do, to present, a kind of agenda for the presentation. Abela reminded me "But what we need is a way to set objectives that are all about the audience, not the presenter.")
* It help us sequencing our information to tell a compelling story (I loved the SCoRE method to define and sequence the main points of a presentation)
* It speaks, and I never saw anything of this kind in others books, about two kinds of different presentations: ballroom presentations and conference room presentations. Most of the books about presentations are about ballroom presentations, then, when we have meetings, when we have commercial presentations we tend to use the same kind of slides and techniques we use and see being used in ballroom presentations with audiences of more than one hundred persons ("Good ballroom style presentations should have minimal text, perhaps just a brief title, and rich, relevant visuals" on the other side "Good conference room style presentations should have lots of relevant detail and text, and should be handed out on paper, never projected"). This is great stuff, I never though about this, laptops and projectors are everywhere, so we tend to use them for whatever reason, for all kinds of occasions, but if we want to be effective we should think before on what kind of presentation style is the most useful.