Book Review: PresentationZen Design

Two new books all about presentation design for non-designers have just hit the scene. The first is Garr Reynold's follow-up to his essential 2008 Presentation Zen, called PresentationZen Design. If you missed it, you can read my discussion of his first book here.

Garr's new one is a highly thought-out and impeccably researched guide to designing effective, clear and powerful on-screen presentations that look professionally designed (and written), but that can be created by the non-designer without fancy tools.

The themes here, obviously, are simplicity, directness and beauty. The book, like so much in this world should be, is divided into thirds:

1. COMPONENTS

In the first section, Garr introduces the mantra of "Think communication, not decoration" and discusses limited use of text and typography (suggesting a limited number of fonts that should be part of your presentation toolkit). He even gives a spirited defense of Helvetica (which I wholeheartedly agree with.) He follows this with a primer on color usage and theory, giving some practical tips for quickly and easily finding color schemes. Then it's on to imagery, perhaps the most important aspect of presentation. Finally, he addresses how to simplify and present your data so that, as I always say, you present not data, but the meaning of your data.

2. PRINCIPLES

Here Garr dives into some larger, but simplified design theories, and applies them to presentation. Using negative space, creating focus and balance, and grids are all covered.

3. THE JOURNEY

Finally, Garr discusses a path for continuing to improve your presentations and skills. 

The book is absolutely littered with effective (and non-effective) slide examples, almost on every page. The last section also gives a half dozen more complete presentation samples. Presentation Zen had wonderful examples, but the new book takes a major step up in showing hundreds and hundreds of real-world slides and the reasons why they are infinitely more effective than just bullet points. 

PresentationZen Design is a more in depth book than Presentation Zen. But it belongs on the desk of anyone who fires up PowerPoint regularly. It also belongs on the desk of the professor who, Garr recounts, graded down his student for presenting an effective, complete academic presentation (with a detailed companion handout), because the student did not use bullet points and because it did not look "like a PowerPoint."