The Non-Designer's Presentation Book

I have been a fan of Robin Williams since I first read Non-Designer's Design Book, The (3rd Edition) several years ago. Robin understands what it is to simplify the discreet components of design to make them understandable for the novice. In this book, she applies those principles to PowerPoint. As a conference speaker and college professor/instructional designer I have seen some pretty awful PPTs. It doesn't take much to improve them. Like slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations and Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery this book gets down to basics and illustrates them beautifully. The key difference with this book is it's size. This is short, sweet and too the point, so it's ideal for that too-busy-to-learn-the-right-way person who really needs the help but won't take the time to get it.

Robin Williams' books are so inspiring and this one provides terrific ideas, practical solutions and lots of examples of how to make a presentation oh-so-not-PowerPoint!! Get this to help you get outside the box, engage your audience differently, and make your presentation fun AND memorable!

As a teacher, this book is a great reference to show the students the correct way and the tips of the trade in creating great presentations so that their fellow students are getting the idea of their presentations. This will help them in college and beyond. It is a real easy book to follow and has everything spelled out for the reader. Thanks.

This book was a great tool for helping me create and prepare for presentations. I needed it for a class I was taking, and its the only book I've needed for school that I still own.

I agree with the other reviewers that this is a good book with lots of practical advice. The only serious drawback is that so much of the information is redundant with the author's other big seller Non-Designer's Design Book, The (3rd Edition) . There is basically only one or two chapters worth of new material here if you have read her Non-Designer's Design Book. If you are thinking about designing just for presentations and have not read the other book grab this one for sure but if you have it consider getting something else instead like Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations or slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations .

Thanks Robin for a great book. I read it over the holidays, and it was great to understand why I was doing a lot of things right with my academic presentations. I'm not a designer, and have never taken any design classes. But this book really made me think a lot about how the delivery is just as important as the content. Thank you for inspiring this science teacher to do better, and my students thank you as well.

Robin is the gold standard for explaining MACs and desk-top computer publishing/graphic design. Well written and engaging.

I bought this book to see what advice a graphics designer would give to slide makers. I am glad I bought it even though I would have liked it to be longer with further design guidelines. There are some good tips, some of which I read for the first time. The book is clear and instructions are easy to follow.

I have read amy books about presentations and this is great little book with a great summary of all the improtant principles. Love the samples and make overs.

Ha cubierto mis espectativas. Es básico, claro y con buenos ejemplos. Además, tiene un toque personal que lo hace más próximo y ameno.

I have two of Robin's other books, which have been influential in my amateur efforts at work designing flyers, proposals and presentations. My presentations have evolved considerably since discovering Garr Reynolds work (Presentation Zen), which is superb, and I was looking forward to this title from Robin to provide me with new ideas and more options beyond Reynolds' 'zen' approach. Robin's conversational and lighthearted writing style makes this an easy read, and she also packs the book with great content. It's full colour throughout, which was pretty much essential given the subject matter. As with her other titles, she gives loads of before and after examples, and the book closes with a quiz chapter asking the reader to identify what's right or wrong with various slide decks, which really hones the eye and forces an understanding of the core principles. In this book, she applies the four principles from 'The Non-Designers Design Book' (Contrast, Repitition, Alignment and Proximity) in the context of presentation design. If you already have that book, this will be a great refresher and deepen your understanding of the application of these principles to slide design. If you haven't read that book, this will be a great introduction to the principles and will provide you with a fantastic toolkit to instantly improve your slide design (you should also get her Non-Designers Design Book for a great primer on typography). Where the book really stands out though is Robin's inclusion of chapters on preparation, clarity of message, plot/storytelling and great insights into better use of the software (screenshots and instructions for PowerPoint and Keynote). This book is the full package - great graphic design advice, tips to help you control your software (rather than it controlling you with auto templates, etc) and help with planning and delivering your overall message. I enjoyed the section on 'Ignore These Rules' where Robin has a friendly dig at the presentation gurus who command us to "Never use animation" or "No more than six words on a slide". She's realistic and down-to-earth enough to realise that, sometimes, a little animation is good or that you can read aloud the text on a slide - as long as everything you're doing is HELPING to get the message across. Nice chapter on handouts and a 15% discount voucher from istockphoto.com at the back. All in all, great stuff. Buy it and make your presentations stand out!

Dieses Buch hilft wirklich beim entwerfen von Präsentationen, insbesondere für Menschen, die nicht an die meist überfüllten und starren Corporate-Design-PowerPoint-Templates gebunden sind. Doch auch diesen hilft es, ein Verständnis für sinnvolle Foliengestaltung zu entwickeln. Als Präsentationsexperte und ehemaliger Designer sage ich: Neben PresentationZen, PresentationZen Design und slide:ology eines der besten Bücher zum Thema!

I'm just a simple engineer who's about to present his thesis with a power point hastily thrown together because "it's easy to make power points". Well, Robin showed me that it isn't, and it is. It isn't because a lot of times throughout the book I told myself " that's how I would have done it, and it certainly looks well!" just to find out that the example was to show a mistake, not a virtuous act. It is, because it is clearly explained how to raise the quality of our ppts with just a few twitches. And I can testify that passing from "horrible" to "not bad at all" isn't hard. I have to thank Robin for yet a thing: by showing me the most common mistakes, she opened my eyes to them and I'm finally able to phrase why a presentation bores me or strikes me as ugly. Once it was something on the line of "I dunno why, but it's ugly", while now sounds more like "damn the guy! He did a fine job, but his slides are misaligned, overcrowded and there's no common thread linking them all!". He just sounds like a non-designer designer comment.