slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations

I have to rain on the parade of this book and Garr Reynold's book (and other ones).

The message is "I'm one of the best slide designers in the world (which is true) and I'm going to show you WHY."

The message should be "I'm one of the best slide designers in the world and I'm going to show you HOW."

You'll see plenty to interest you, but unless you're a full-fledged graphic designer you'll never recreate these slides. Imagine putting this book (and the Reynold's book) into a room with some of your worst slide creators, or even yourself. Would you see an improvement in their skills? I doubt it.

You might as well become a painter by reading books that have the world's greatest pictures in them. Even though there is explanatory text here it isn't enough to bridge the gap.

To see a book written for its audience, try the "Before and After" books by Jon McWade which deal with desktop publishing. Unfortunately John has not yet tackled slides, but you can see an page layout idea and make it yourself in minutes.

So, sorry about this, because both this and Reynold's book are "nice" books. The energy has gone into the book's design and production rather than the content. But that makes them coffee-table books, and unless you have a coffee table in your office I'd advise that you give both of them a miss.

This book is to the point and easily digestible. This book should be a required reading for anyone.

This book will help you get rid of those old presentation ideas that were imparted to you by those who don't even present well.

Keep in mind the definition of the English suffix -ology or -logy "denotes a field of study or academic discipline."
This is not a How to book for learning production tricks or shortcuts, or how to make a concise, interesting and informative presentation.
There are not enough big, bright eye grabbing pictures to qualify as a coffee table book.

Once you get used to the tiny grey text and lots of white space, you can begin to concentrate on communications & presentation theory. Then it will be a fair Presentations 101 textbook.

Nancy Duarte is managing Duarte Design, a company that has created some high-profile presentations (Al Gore is one of the clients). They (her husband is the company's CFO) started out in the 80s when the Apple Macintosh brought desk top publishing and graphics design to the masses, and have now become one of the big brands in professional presentation design.

This is the perfect book for those who have mastered the PowerPoint (or Apple Keynote) technical skills and need to make the final jump to master concepts usually taught in art schools (rather than software manuals):
- Picking pleasing color schemes
- Slide composition
- Typography
- Etc.

The trained eye can extract almost everything there is to know about presentation design. However, this is not the book that will teach you magic that will turn your beginner-level PowerPoint edits into a professional presentation.

Many subjects discussed in this books are covered in other material as well (minimal bullet points, cut words, use professional images, etc. etc.) However, there are some very specific things that I picked up in this book that were new to me:

- Thinking about cinematic movement for animations or slide composition
- Creating one big map and using the PowerPoint push transition to navigate it: one presentation - one big slide
- A large library of chart concept sketches, there were many new ones I did not use before
- Stressing to adopt a "designer" mentality to presentations

Things that I found less useful/interesting (personal preference):
- (Many) direct references to the services Duarte Design can offer
- Case examples (many of which are the same as on Duarte's site) are not always useful
- The section on data charts was relatively weak

But overall, a warm recommendation to purchase this book. It is well written, nicely illustrated and brings all the presentation design essentials together in one place, including many references to further reading and almost all the big presentation "brands" in the industry.

I found the book interesting but with the small print, very hard to read. More theory than practical help in putting together a presentation, especially in the instructional area.