SlideShare is a great service and a huge repository of slideable wisdom, but it doesn't make it easy to find good stuff. In my four years with the site, I've favorited about 25 presentations. Below are the ten I wanted to share. You have probably seen some of them before.
Thinking About Innovation by Noah Brier.
How To Build a Web App, also by Noah.
Designing Interesting Moments by Bill Scott.
History of a Button by Bill DeRouchey, author of the PushClickTouch blog.
How To Do Propagation Planning by Griffin Farley.
Just Add Points? What UX Can (and Cannot) Learn From Games by Sebastian Deterding.
Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents, a sequel to "Just Add Points?"
Connection Planningness by Jason Oke and Gareth Kay
Beyond Advertising by Adrian Ho
Level Designers, Core Space Creation and Level Flow by Matthias Worch
Bonus tracks:
- SlideShare Zeitgeist 2009, by SlideShare. A rare compendium of deck-related trivia: that the average number of slides in a presentation is 19.33, that presentations in French are, on average, the longest, and that Arial is the most popular typeface.
- Smoke - The Convenient Truth makes a strong argument why you should buy tobacco stocks, although the authors' intent might have been different.
I also have a rant (unrelated to the list above) that I felt I had to get out but that probably doesn't deserve a post of its own.
The before/after image on the top of the post is a slide from a sample SlideShare deck by Garr Reynolds, the Presentation Zen author, and it illustrates the unfortunate sideways evolution of the corporate communication genre. We used to spend hours fumbling with PowerPoint templates and animations and slide transitions. Today, we spend hours coming up with clever one-liners and raiding Flickr and stock image banks in search of the perfect generic photo in high resolution. The result is pretty much the same, only now the image-heavy and word-light decks can't even stand on their own without the presenter to provide context.
Andrew Abela calls this new style "ballroom presentations" and he says that "conference room presentations" call for a different approach. I am not sure I completely agree with everything in the Extreme Presentation method he proposes, but the novelty is refreshing.
Original Post: http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2010/11/ten-good-decks.html
