With his insightful, practical, latest work, Garr Reynolds demystifies the doing of dynamic eye-candy and pens an everyman’s guidebook to uncommonly good design. Reynolds’ follow-up to his popular Presentation Zen, this new volume – Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations – picks up where that other book left off, taking presenters on an informative, informal tour the basics of successful design.
What’s Hot
This book is so well organized and full of practical, time-saving techniques, tools and concepts one feels empowered and informed within the first few pages. This book will absolutely boost your design game up several steps in no time. It’s easy to imagine that this volume will find itself a dedicated spot on the shelves of many presenters. This is the kind of book that creates a cult.
What’s Not
Those with a great eye, a lot of practical experience or an educated understanding of design fundamentals may not find much to glean here. This is definitely a volume aimed at newbies and still-hungry intermediates.
The Bottom Line
We all spend a lot of time focused on the big picture of presenting: storytelling. However, the look of a given presentation can make or break our entire pitch. Don’t forget: a picture is worth a thousand words.
Reynolds’ book isn’t a step-by-step instruction manual or a textbook, but it is an extremely practical, common-sense guide to design-for-people-who-don’t-know-design. For instance, Reynolds demystifies the controversy of which font to use. He cuts to the chase, eliminating all but 8 of the most familiar fonts, making a muddled mess into a manageable molehill in one page of insightful advice. Have trouble with color schemes? Of course you do. Who doesn’t? Reynolds simply walks readers through another quickie about how to use Adobe’s Kuler color-scheme-generator. Problem solved.
‘Zen gets down to brass tacks on subjects from matching colors to content to using images and video in your presentations. Reynolds keeps it simple throughout, never positing a concept where a short-cut or a trick will suffice.
‘Zen also goes beyond simple slide-design to include great guest-cameos from experts like Scot Kelby and Stephen Few taking point on troublesome topics like optimizing photography in a presentation or designing the perfect graph.
If you feel you have room to improve as a designer – or you are absolutely clueless – you will find much to love in this breath-of-fresh-air disguised as just-another-design-book. Not only is this the kind of guide that will inspire new creations, it’s the kind that you’ll be giving as a gift to every presenter on your team.
