For years, Nancy Duarte</b and her husband, Marc, had been running a successful design company in Silicon Valley specializing in marketing materials—when one of their biggest clients, Apple, laid off a bunch of employees in the ’90s, business slowed, but then many of those marketers wound up at other jobs and called up the firm with new assignments. After the dotcom bubble burst, business was steady enough for them to ride it out, especially once the Duartes, inspired by reading Jim Collins‘s Good to Great, decided to focus exclusively on the thing they did best: creating slideshow presentations. “All we did was drop all the other work, and everything became more reasonable,” she recalled recently, chatting in a hotel lobby just off Times Square while on tour for her new handbook, Slide:ology. “Everybody still wanted slides; you always need a good story, especially in times of economic downturn.”
Storytelling is the element that makes the Duartes’ work stand out—and chances are good you’ve seen one of the best examples of their craft: Duarte Design created the slides for Al Gore‘s global warming lecture, the one featured in An Inconvenient Truth. It helped that Gore was himself an excellent presenter, but if you get a chance to watch the film, notice how he uses slides and images to supplement his message, rather than substitute for it. It’s a marked change from the stereotypical notion of a PowerPoint presentation, where, as Duarte puts it, “you have a human talking to other humans, and then you stick this slide slow between them.”
“What’s ruined so many presentations is people who build slides for themselves, not the audience,” Duarte continued. “If we made them for the audience, they would stimulate and provoke thought.” Instead, many presenters make the mistake of trying to cram a lot of facts onto their slides, using them much like a teleprompter: “The data means a lot to them, but not so much to the audience.”
But, she emphasized, “it’s not that the tool is evil—it’s the decisions of the users that make it a poor tool.” And that’s where Slide:ology comes in. (Her first bit of advice: Walk away from the computer, get a note pad, and think carefully about what you really want to say… and who your audience is.)
Duarte said she began to get serious about writing a book on presentation design shortly after a friend and colleague, Garr Reynolds, got a deal to write a book based on his blog, Presentation Zen. In fact, Reynolds encouraged her to do it, and the two even wound up exchanging notes to make sure they weren’t overlapping on too much of the same material.
“It was some of the most fun I’ve ever had,” she said of the creative process for the book, explaining her strategy of having one major thought per two-page spread, and how she would organize and re-organize notes that had been taped to the walls of her studio to establish her structure.
Now that the book’s out, Duarte has a blog, and she’s eager to talk about recent examples of great presentations, like the comic book Scott McCloud created to explain the technology that went into Google’s new web browser, Chrome. (As she read it, she explained, she asked herself one question: “Would this have been as interesting to me without the pictures?”)
She’s also working with TED, the annual conference dedicated to innovation in arts, sciences, and business; Slide:ology has been added to the group’s “book club” of recommended reads. It’s a perfect match; after all, Duarte smiled, the organization is dedicated to “changing the world, one presentation at a time.” And when you look at everything that’s been set in motion by Al Gore’s slides, that doesn’t seem like such an absurd goal.