What is this thing? Why am I Here?

Once in a while, an inflection point appears in a well established practice. Those who see a new, better way to do something don't just move away from the desultory pack, they accelerate away. Presentation techniques have reached just such an inflection point.

Books like Presentation Zen and Slide:ology describe a new approach to using tools that have been around for decades, like PowerPoint and Keynote. Both are wonderful books.

But the three of us are software geeks. Reading about a new philosophy of presentations is one thing, but we like concrete instructions. In the architect and software ecospheres, the concept of a pattern exists as a way to create standard terms for solutions to common problems. A pattern describes a set of related concepts in a standard format, with a memorable name. For example, in the software world, you can say "I need an object which can only be instantiated once, and all subsequent attempts to create a new one returns the lone instance" or you can say "I need a Singleton". The Singleton design pattern is defined in the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-oriented Design, which provides a well known, concise way to refer to a common technique.

Patterns are a bit like recipes, but with an important distinction: there is no such thing as an "anti-recipe". In the software world, an anti-pattern is a common cliche, fallacy, or poor design. Unfortunately, most of the presentations we've seen will benefit first by un-doing years of damage caused by too-eager tools and literally no instruction on how to build good presentations. Our book contains mostly patterns (recipes), but it also includes anti-patterns (things to avoid), so that you don't find yourself bringing a knife to a gun fight.

The working title is Presentations Patterns (and Anti-patterns). This book provides more than 50 (and counting) patterns and anti-patterns for creating extremely effective and engaging presentations.