Strengths
Content
Crandall does a great job grabbing his audience’s attention from the very beginning. The title of the deck alone caught our eye immediately because of its unexpected take on the much-discussed iPhone 5 unveiling. We’ve seen a lot of articles about the new device from Apple, but few that have billed themselves quite as enticingly as Crandall does here. He offers us a look at the new phone from a different point of view than the rest of the techies out there.
Crandall’s use of witty, subtle humor and a first person point of view lends a lot of power to this simplistic deck. The little Android guy makes us laugh with his speech bubbles (“I don’t care,” “Presents FTW!”) and hilarious faces (big eyes, mouth gaping open). And the first person point of view taken throughout the deck makes the content relatable and personal.
Simplicity
Smartly, Crandall designs his deck to be consistent with Apple’s celebrated Keynote style: very simplistic, adorned with little text and big visuals. This is the presentation design style we continually champion, and it lends Crandall’s deck extra power because of the consistency between topic and design.
He also does a great job of breaking content into multiple slides (i.e. “The thing that interests me most…” on one slide, “… is a platform with consistency” on the next). In general, the simplistic look and feel of the deck is excellent. We wish more presentations embraced this clean, simple look. When in doubt, turn to minimalism. Less is more.
Weaknesses
Color
While we’re onboard with the minimalistic, sleek style Crandall has going on here, we would have liked to see a tad bit more color in the deck. It’s not that we didn’t like the basic black color scheme, it’s that Crandall could have used little bits of color here and there to make the most important information pop off the slide.
On slides 3-5, for example, we weren’t entirely sure where to look or what the most important information on the slide was because the all words were in the same color scheme; none of them really pops off the slide. A little color would have done the trick.
Type
Again this weakness can be partly attributed to the sleek Apple-y style Crandall was going for, but with that said, we would have liked to see slightly more creative fonts used in the deck. The basic san serif font used throughout is completely fine if a little boring. However, the (very) cursive accent font Crandall uses as an accent type doesn’t mesh well with the content it disseminates. For example on slide 23, the content includes “pisses me off” and “I hate this!” – content that doesn’t sync up very well with such a pretty, curvy font. A rougher type would have disseminated that tone much better. As we’ve mentioned before, the devil’s in the details, so make sure you consider the type you use in relation to the content it tells.
In Summation
Crandall’s presentation is a great example of how a significant amount of power lies in simplicity. As we like to quote: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” The deck caught our eye at the outset and kept our attention throughout, even garnering some chuckles along the way. Sleek design, an unexpected perspective and humorous first person storytelling make it a great presentation.
