Took in Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points webinar today. Interestingly enough, he had six violations of yesterday’s blog entry in the first 20 minutes 🙂 That said, I like his approach to cleaning up PowerPoint and his method will help thousands, to be sure.But lest we get caught in another method without understanding why we’re doing what we’re doing, Cliff had a very clear statement of Rule #1. He’s trying to make his method draw upon the analogy of a screen play, and he stated Rule #1 this way: “Never forget that your audience is your main character.” I’d have liked him to say it about a dozen more times, just for effect.One other tidbit. He quoted some research that says removing irrelevant/superfluous information from slides actually INCREASES retention. This was stated in the context of corporate “branding”, which typically means putting a tagline and logo on every page. Bad idea — doesn’t help the message at all. As Jeff Bailey says, “if they don’t know who you are and who you represent by slide #2, you have other problems.“
Do everything you can to (and remove everything that doesn’t) help your audience get the message.