A few months ago I visited FITC in Amsterdam and Toronto. The whole event was fun but what bothered me was the way most of the sessions started, “Sorry, I’ll be using powerpoint slides”.
Altho almost all the speakers used this most of them thought it was a very uncool thing to do. Slides don’t feel right.
This vibe was perfectly picked up by adobe evangelist and Toronto keynote speaker Mike Downey. He didn’t need to apologize, no, he didn’t use powerpoint or keynote to make slides. He made them in AIR, the crowd liked it. I however, I just saw another kind of slides.
But what’s wrong with slides? These days we need them more frequently to sell, share idea’s, explain concepts… There’s noting wrong with slides, it’s something else.
EriK Natzke, for example had his presentation build in flash (I think). It allowed him to jump in and out, go back and forward insert more files, go deeper into stuff… The presentation had a treestructure just like you would expect from a simple site. Not linear at all.
It made me think on how I’ve been presenting all these years and how difficult it is to make a good keynote. The software is childsplay but the hardest thing is to put a concept in a linear story that can be understood by your client or audience. It’s always a lucky guess…
A good concept isn’t a linear thing and this is why I would like to put my slides in a mindmap structure. This way I only need to think of my approach on how to present it but i’m not stuck in a one-line story. If the audience responds differently I can adapt easily and tell my story in a way that fit’s them best.
Keynotes and powerpoint haven’t really evolved and I don’t think Iwork or Office will do that soon. From time to time we see new software to make slides like sliderocket and 280slides but next to using cloudcomputing they don’t do anything new.
I wish adobe would take on the challenge to build a great slide-machine, revolutionize the way we make and use keynotes. Not a keynote with more functions but something more flexible and dimensional. It’ll be more easy for us to visualize our stuff and allow us to present in a more interactive way.
I think Adobe is able to make the slide cool again… They’re missing it in their catalog and a big amount stuff that is made with adobe software is sold with slides. There is no shame in slides.
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