Nancy Duarte: evaluation

Transcript context

…Presentations used to be 35 millimeter slides in an old carousel. In fact, that's what Al Gore had when he showed, he was like, here's my slide carousel from the seventies. It was just how it was done. But Apple was the first company to hook up the computer to a projector at scale. Now the projectors at these big venues like San Jose Convention Center, I mean it was huge and it was risky. So, because we were first in, they pushed us to start to do the presentations in this tool and it was black and white. Everything was black and white when we first started. And then we started to push and push and push from how we illustrated things in the tool, how we would colorize clip art. I mean, I'm talking like clip art packages just came out and they're like, "Hey, grab these, colorize them." And so it was a really momentous moment to win them as an account. And I remember the tool had started to really take off and it was ugly. You can call it fugly, I don't know what you want to call it, but everyone who made slides did it so poorly, just so poorly. And we were kind of pushing the boundaries of it to make it look attractive. And there was a sales conference in 1992 in San Francisco and the leader of sales at the time was kind of a creative savant of sorts. And I remember he's like, "I don't know how you're going to do it, but I want you to take the whole slide." This is when slides were basically teleprompted covered in text. If you could stick a piece of clip art on it, you were lucky. And he said, "I want you to just make the whole slide, it's just covered with the word big in hot pink. And I want the background black, because when this slide pops up in all pink big, I want it to actually light the faces of the people in the audience." And it was like I didn't know how to, we couldn't do that. We had to go into free hand, convert it to this, do these six steps, and then we came up with a small JPEG at the time or png or something and we scaled it up. So, it was still kind of pixelated. And I remember I was in that hall during the rehearsal and the production team gasped. Couple people squealed. They're like, "Who did this? I mean, it was just the word big in magenta pink." And I just remember thinking, this is how it's supposed to be done. Putting the tool in the hands of the masses kind of destroyed the medium itself. And I feel like the first 10 or so years I was in business, it was reshaping this medium that ran amuck when it got into the hands of the users, it just went completely the opposite way that it was supposed to. So, it's weird to say that was a real defining moment for me to say, wait, we can do this different and we can return to how they used to be done when they were 35 millimeter slides. So, that's one story. And then I think we're very good at mapping to the brand requirements. So, we take this tool, whatever the tool, we have all our brands use different ones. They use Slides, Keynote, they use PowerPoint. d then I think we're very good at mapping to the brand requirements. So, we take this tool, whatever the tool, we have all our brands use different ones. They use Slides, Keynote, they use PowerPoint. We use whatever tool the brand wants and we push it in each medium. But we take their brand guidelines and really push it into the spoken word medium where when they stand up on a stage, it's cinematic. The visuals can become an experience in itself. And I remember when Apple came up with the Think Different campaign. Steve Jobs was just back and my designer, everyone Photoshop was new. And everyone's doing these beveled backgrounds with tons of crap on the background. And I walked by, I'm like, "No, oh, we can't have a blue frame looking photo frame to for the Think Different campaign. This is not going to work." And so I remember looking at all the posters and remembering the Alfred Hitchcock ones. It had these particulates like these particulates, and it was just shadows. And I found a stock video that Adobe had made at the time, and it was just particulates floating through the air at the angle and we stuck the six color apple on top of it. That was so revolutionary back there to push the brand and get out of the way every, the whole world was making these hideous templates. So, there are these moments that pushed the company forward because of an idea that I knew would not be okay for the Apple brand, therefore it shouldn't be okay for any brand. And I think those are just a couple stories of how to really push the medium in a way that is more pleasing to the audience. The audience just likes it better when it's really clear what you're supposed to focus on. We love that brand. We love it. Okay, so let's get a little tactical, because you're talking about some very specific things that you've found to be working. So, everyone listening to this podcast has probably heard many times it's really important to be great at presentations that there's so much power in storytelling and communication, all these things. And they probably read a bunch of books and blog posts and watch videos of how to give a great presentation. But myself, and I feel like most people sit down at a deck when they're about to present to an all hand, say a week later or are going to do a meeting. And I'm always just like, okay, what do I do? Okay, there's like a beginning, middle end, they should have some kind of problem. And it's always like, I don't know what I'm doing. So, if someone were to just be listening to this podcast and they're like, I'm going to write a post-it to myself of three bullet points of things that I should remember when I'm starting a deck, what are those three bullet points?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.