Posted by Sam Thatte » 1 Comment »

They laughed when I sat down at the piano…

Amazing things happen when amazing presentations are created and shown. Startups come alive, new products are launched, babies are born (oops, wrong blog) employees get promoted, and general happiness prevails! On the other hand, if a poorly put together presentation is all you have in your arsenal to communicate your idea, present a report or seek funding for a new venture, your chances of success are greatly diminished.

Take for example, some of the best presentations that have been circulated like Shift Happens and The Brand Gap. The quality of these presentations are exemplary. They tell stories, grab your attention, they focus on their main point and show images, and data that bring reality into the room. Over a million presentations are given each day, and only a very small, no, a miniscule percentage of them are amazing. But we are growing accustomed to that trend.

And at the same time, we bitch and complain when we have to attend a meeting with PowerPoint as the star.

I recently had an opportunity to attend a presentation on security products. Now, realizing that the topic itself was drier than a popcorn fart, I braced myself to deal with slides made for a presentation like Death by PowerPoint. I was wrong.  This dude came up with an amazing opening, had slides that had some very relevant graphics, few words that emphasized what he was talking about and most importantly told some great stories! He closed strong, with a call to action and there were about 15 – 20 attendees lined up at the podium to sign up for his services.

Express Yourself – Visually and Verbally

 

Photo by Jelene

Try to remember how we communicated as children. As soon as we were able to hold a pencil or a crayon in our hands, we were encouraged, sometimes strongly, to start drawing or coloring pictures. Even learning the alphabet, was linked to images of food, animals and or images of objects  that we were accustomed to seeing around us. Then as we got older we were not associating words and pictures any more, the expectation was verbal and written communication.

As adults a lot of us have completely lost the art of effective visual expression. Imagine yourself at a meeting where you have been asked to draw and color a story of what would make for effective customer relations at your job.  Do I hear,

“What the hell! I would suck at that!”

Communicating effectively with pictures and words is no longer easy and it feels strained. But then again, when a presentation is well designed and well delivered, it has the capacity to become a very powerful communication tool.  One of the reasons that Apple and all of its products are so amazing and so amazingly successful (other than their design and the user experience) is the amazing way that Steve Jobs delivers their new product launches. Ever seen one of those?

So why am I Playing the Piano?

My job on this blog is to bring you relevant information on how to create Amazing Presentations. I hope to cover topics in Slide Creation & Design, bring you closer to some Amazing People, create some PowerPoint templates that you can use and show you what else is lurking around the web in this medium.

Your job is to subscribe to the RSS feed, like this page on Facebook, Tweet it till you drop and generally be nice. And yes, If you would like help, Please contact me. Also take a look at my services page.

I hope you will continue to visit and subscribe to the blog!

Talk to you soon!

Sam Thatte

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