This is a first draft of the full catalog of patterns referenced in the Presentation Patterns book.
Pattern Names are the very raison d'être of the book. They are meant to be always memorable, generally descriptive, and occasionally humorous. Our observation is that once a behavior, product, or idea is named, it can be more effectively and concisely referenced amongst colleagues. Once able to be efficiently referenced, that pattern can be more frequently implemented, or if an anti-pattern, avoided.
Feedback and comments are welcomed. Just drop the authors an email at info@presentationpatterns.com or a tweet to @ppatterns
Creating a presentation that the presenter decides during the presentation as to which content is shown. Typically, this is a group of related slides, and the speaker solicits the interest of the crowd to gauge interest.
Using less than perfect lines, fonts, and other visual elements to purposely remove some of the polish from your presentation.
Don't use tiny fonts in a desire to cram more information on a slide. Slide size is completely arbitrary and has no relationship to the proper size of the content.
Creating a presentation that purposefully does not follow a linear narrative arc.
TV weathermen face forward and gesture towards the screen behind them, which is really a green screen. An anti-weatherman is a presenter who turns his back on the crowd and reads his own slides.
Create an agenda trail throughout your presentation to provide context on progress.
In television, the fourth wall is the TV screen, and most actors ignore that "wall"
because they don't want to be seen acknowledging the cameras. Presentations have an
implicit fourth wall just in front of the audience. To break the artificial separation
between presenter and audience, step through that wall.
A common anti-pattern that many presenters exhibit is talking too fast and not leaving enough time for the audience to fully understand the deeper implications of their talk. While difficult, breathing room is the purposeful insertion of quiet to allow important concepts time to germinate.
According to the grammar police, outlines should never have a single point at any level. Don't create bullet points that have only one sub-bullet; bullets in presentations mimic outlines and it "looks" grammatically incorrect to have orphan bullets.
Place little clues throughout your presentation in the service of a dramatic
revelation at the end of the talk. When done well, this has the effect of a surprise
ending to a movie.
A presentation where every slide is a long series of dull bullet points.
Use distinct slides throughout the presentation to supply agenda context.
The only true preparation for unusual occurances is practice. This pattern defines the types and number of practice sessions you need.
Using a huge sectioned canvas with your presentation laid out linearly, and zooming on the constituent sections as you proceed through your presentation.
The slide shows out of date content by graying it out as the presenter progresses through the slide.
See Also: Charred Trail
A pattern for presenters showing text-based output from other tools, emergence
suggests that code isn't a static display but uses motion, transitions, highlights, and
other presentation effects to enhance the corresponding points.
Stephen Colbert has a recurring segment where he argues with the bullet points
behind him, which is an example of breaking the standard tropes of presentations (for
example, agreement with what you've said and your slides).
Ideas don't have a predetermined word count and accordingly you shouldn't
artificially pad content to make it appear to fill a slide. No law says that every
thought worth having will fit on a single slide, so stop trying.
See Also Kleptomaniac.
The act of constructing the presentation differs from presenting the presentation.
See Also: Crucible
Don't settle for the defaults or stock templates from any tool. If you do use a stock
template, at least customize it so that it's as unique as a signature.
DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) suggests that you use the (limited) facilities in
presentation tools to embed the output of external tools rather than copy and paste
output and/or screen shots.
Look closely at the edges of reality because sometimes the cracks are deep.
Very short talk designed to sell the idea of a longer talk. It can be an extraction of
the three highlights of a three-act structured talk or a highly condensed version of a
longer talk built with significant accordion joints.
See Also Accordion Joints, Three-act Play.
A technique that allows you place a central idea on the center of the slide, then add
supporting elements underneath as the main idea migrates to the top of the slide. This
Slideument pattern allows you to use fewer slides yet separate important points.
A presenter who reads his slides to the audience is doing two things: 1) proving that
they graduated from first grade and 2) boring the audience to tears.
Floodmarks are marketing and branding headers, footers, and watermarks that invade the
content area of the slide. Do you really need to market to your audience on every single
slide? Egregious instances of this anti-pattern make it difficult to create content
because two-thirds of the slide is floodmarked.
Someone who believes using a cacophony of fonts will "jazz up" a presentation.
Disharmonic fonts actually make presentations gruesome and more difficult to
read.
See Also Fontagrapher.
Like foreshadowing in literature, this pattern adds elements to a talk to seed an idea early that will be resolved (hopefully with more resonance) later.
In Germany, most nouns are capitalized. For some bizarre reason, lots of non-German presenters randomly capitalize nouns on slides.
Either buy or use the remote control for your computer so that you don't have to hover around it to make slide transitions. Hand-held clickers free you from the tyranny of the podium.
By using either a small mirror or the carefully angled reflection in the glossy screen on your computer, you can see what's happening on the screen behind you, and gesture towards it without turning your back on the audience. This is particularly handy when you have tools (like Keynote 2009) that don't show the actual transitions in the presenter display, just an indicator that the transition is complete.
"Hiccup Words" are involuntary exclamations ("Ummm", "Ahhh", etc.) that distract and detract from the presentation.
Carefully setting up foreshadowing, context, and clues to build towards a revelation that will resonate with the crowd, either because of a universal truth or because of a context-specific reference. This is the part of the talk you want people to talk about in the hallway afterwards.
A timed talk format popularized at O'Reilly conferences.
Using invisible elements (e.g., ones that never appear on printed out versions of the
slides) to preserve a sense of surprise in cases where you are forced to provide
handouts (slideuments?) in advance of your talk.
A presentation in kiosk mode operates without user intervention, auto-advancing slides and automatically repeating the entire presentation in a loop. A kiosk slice is a portion (typically 3 to 10 slides) of a presentation that repeats embedded inside a larger presentation.
A kleptomaniac picks up random pieces of clipart, stock photos, and other tchotchkes
and places them in the presentation to fill the empty space.
Use appropriate slang and other "insider" colloquialisms in your presentation to bond with your audience.
A timed presentation, usually of 5 minutes in duration and sometimes including a
specific number of slides permitted/required.
See Also Ignite.
Rather than do a live demonstration, record it and play it back as part of the slide.
This prevents errors, aids concentration, allows you to use the heads-up display to see
slide meta-data, and allows you to make additional points while the demonstration is
playing.
Record your entire presentation and send it electronically, which is much more
effective than saving your presentation as a PDF.
(Sometimes an anti-pattern). Doing a live demonstration of a tool or technique by
temporarily leaving your presentation.
Humor adds tremendous spice and interest to your talk. If it fits the material, try to add something humorous on a regular basis (like every 10 minutes).
A rolling stone gathers no moss; a mossless presentation moves at a very high rate of
speed. Note that the exposition of the topic may move at a different pace -- this
pattern only applies to the presentation itself.
Presentations are a form of story telling, so why not leverage the few thousand years
experience for telling stories. A common trope in stories is a narrative arc; organizing
your presentation in a similar way strengthens your audience's resonation with their
lifetime of story listening experience.
Using a common transition most of your slides, then obviously changing it for effect.
The more jarring and obvious the change, the more change you have of startling your
audience into paying attention to the transition.
Don't use non-words on slides. They diminish your credibility with the more educated
audience members. Popular non-words include 'alot' and 'irregardless'.
Creating the agenda for the talk by soliciting suggestions from the crowd and
dynamically constructing the presentation around only what they want to see.
See Also Talklet, Accordion Joints.
Use overlays (for example, shapes or lines) and transparent boxes to differentiate the
focus a tool or other demonstration.
Using transitions to replace text on the slide with different (generally related)
text, directly overwriting the original text.
When delivering a technical topic to an unknown audience, don't assume that the things
you think are rudimentary resonates with the audience the same way. It is a common
anti-pattern to start speeding up if you think the audience is already familiar with the
topic because they are quiet, but the opposite might be true (they are quiet because
they are confused). Treat your topic as if it were the most interesting thing in the
world, and you're speaking to a group of smart people who've never heard of it.
Don't use passive voice on slides. It makes you sound unsure and makes your audience suspect you're not being entirely honest.
Pecha Kucha is a rigidly timed presentation style originating in Japan, where each presentation consists of 20 slides, each shown automatically for 20 seconds each.
Place content/information in your slide that you know to be incorrect as a way to set
up the correct information.
There's an opportunity to present without slides in many forms of mass transit. Be so
well prepared on your topic and presentation that you can dynamically deliver the top 3
to 5 points in anywhere from 1 to 15 minutes in a bus, a train, or a plane to your
seatmate.
See Also Accordion Joints, Elevator Pitch, Pecha Kucha, Ignite .
Giving a presentation should always be more than a speech, using the facilities of the
presentation tool to enhance your message. If you just want to make a speech, do that,
and don't use a presentation tool.
Paying careful attention to the end version of your slide in the presentation tool because that's the version that will print. When creating Slideuments, extra effort is required to make the printouts look good (and not have extraneous transitional elements on the slide).
Bring props to liven your talk. A very well known technical presenter, Venkat
Subramaniam, brings hard candy to his talks and throws them (forcefully!) to people who
participate and answer questions.
For some odd reason, many presenters use random capitalization of the words on
slides. Slides should use title capitalization for the title and sentence capitalization
for the rest of the slide.
See Also German Nouns.
Using high quality stock photos that have nothing to do with the overall visual theme but work for one small piece.
|
Random stock photos are the clipart of the new millenium. |
||
| --Martin Fowler | ||
See Also Kleptomaniac, Fontaholic.
The proper use of fonts in a presentation silently but strongly communicates the
author's precision, selectiveness, restraint, and knowledge to the audience.
See Also Fontaholic, Kleptomaniac.
Don't put complete sentences on slides unless it's a direct quote. Slides should provide as little as necessary to convey the point; you don't want your audience reading entire sentences.
See Also Cookie Cutter.
Don't add unrelated material just to make your slides the same length.
See Also Cookie Cutter.
A presentation that is trying to be both a presentation and an attractive printed
version of the presentation as well. This is a commonly required anti-pattern, so an
entire chapter is devoted to dealing with the issues it raises.
When you have stale content, one way to subtly get rid of it uses a very (almost
imperceptible) fade transition for either the slide or elements on the slide. It should
happen so gradually that the audience doesn't even realize it's happening.
See Also Soft Transitions.
Add both slide and element transitions to soften the transition between slides.
See Also Slow Fade.
When executing a presentation, don't leave content on the screen after you've stopped
talking about it. Many presenters have the bad habit of leaving the last slide they were
discussing on the screen after they have moved on to the next topic.
Presenters often forget to pace their material. A planned ebb and flow of pace is
fine, but if the audience is feeling force fed, then experiencing a famine of
information during a talk, the material wasn't spaced and paced properly.
The term "syntax highlighting" is a programmer's term, referring to the common approach of developer's tools shading different kinds of statements with different fonts and colors to aid understanding. As a presentation pattern, it refers to showing demonstrable things in a way natural to the audience. Programmers are accustomed to seeing source code with highlights, so plain text code looks odd to them.
A style of presentation originated by Takahashi (and popularized in the west by
Laurence Lessig) that uses 1 or 2 words per slide but transitions through them very
quickly.
Instead of doing an hour long presentation, do three semi-related 20 minute talks. This allows great flexibility for time, content, and narrative flow.
Presentations are story telling. If you can create a little bit of purposeful tension near the beginning and resolve it by the end, you can leverage the audience's experience with traditional fiction and other narrative art.
Don't rush to use a presentation tool as you are building a talk. Thinking deeply
about the topic and designing the content should happen outside the presentation
software, using simple analog tools like post-it notes and mind maps.
Presentations (especially keynotes) tell a story. This pattern suggests that you
should model your presentation after centuries-tested narrative techniques like a
three-act structure: introduce issues, describe troubles, show resolution.
See Also Narrative Arc.
You can establish a pattern in the minds of attendees by using consistent transitions between slides throughout. This allow allows you to change either the timing or the entire transition to multiple an effect around an important point.
Use highlighting (either intrinsic in the tool or a third party add-on like OmniDazzle) to draw more attention to something on the slide, generally not part of the slide itself but a picture or screenshot of another tool or application. "Traveling highlights" implies that you use transitions to highlight different parts of the display as you walk through the technical details.
Your audience can only absorb a certain amount of material in a short time. If you
limit your presentation to 3 main speaking points, it allows you to cover them
thoroughly and doesn't overwhelm your audience.
TV weatherman use a green screen and a monitor to see and gesture towards map details. You should never turn your back on the audience, so if you need to point out something on the screen, do it like a weatherman: stand off to the side so that you can see both the screen and the audience as you gesture.
See Also Intern Weatherman.
Use a common repeating visual element to tie the disparate parts of your presentation together.
See Also Fontaholic, Recovering Fonaholic, Fontographer.