After several internal brainstorms and sketching sessions, we ended up with these concepts.

We all felt that there was something special about the word resonate being made out of dots that look like they are being magnetically pulled towards a gathering. The sketch was inspired by this stitchery I found online.

Diandra, my Creative Director felt that the dots could be people walking or running towards the gathering. It could look like an aerial shot of the Million Man March in Washington DC.

My team meticulously drew all the figures and shadows. We played with color combos and textures and ended up with this AMAZING cover.

What do you think? We’d love your feedback and comments. Stay tuned as we will be sharing more of these insights along the way.

April 7
April 21
May 5
May 19
June 9

http://blog.duarte.com/workshop/

And while you’re at it, check out a few photos from the past workshops!

All photos courtesy of Mark Heaps

Take some of his advice and you, too, can be a presentation rockstar!

Songwriters: Floyd Nathaniel Hills, Timothy Z. Mosley, and Justin R. Timberlake

Photo Courtesy of Klein Dytham Architecture

The theme for the evening’s presentations is RECALL: To summon back to awareness of or concern with the subject or situation at hand. So go hearken back and let the presenters take you on a trip down their memory lane.

Also, as you may recall, event is free (!) and the 20-slides-for-20-seconds format is great inspiration for keeping your own presentation short, sweet, and simply striking. Hope you can make it!

This year at TED, Mr. Gates talked about climate change. Not sure who’s building his content or slides, but please keep them employed!

By the way, deeming Gates purgatory-free is my way of making up for my snarky comments about Ballmer.

Here’s his presentation and slides:

Gates claims there’s a mathematical equation we can use to get carbon emissions down to zero.

The goal is to innovate to the zero emission point.

We’re producing tons of CO2 each year.

Here’s the formula. And mathematically for this to come to zero, one of these has to go to zero or it won’t work out.

He then gave an overview of the formula:

Sometimes we take our energy for granted because it’s so readily available. Here’s a shot of kids doing their homework under street lamps because they have no electricity at home.

Can we generate an energy source that doesn’t produce carbon?

We need a miracle, and miracles are tough to plan.

TED loved the release of the mosquitoes last year, and this year he released fireflies, because they produce light. At the same time the bugs were released, a lovely animation on the screen simulated an evening sky with lightning bugs. (And when the talk ended, he played the song 10,000 Lightning Bugs.)

He then explained the five areas in which we need a miracle.

Wind and solar energy aren’t constant enough to be stored, and won’t fit in batteries.

He did a good job showing data without data charts.

He made a case for nuclear by showing how reactors burn like a candle via a lovely animation sequence.

There is enough nuclear waste stored in KY to power the country for 200 more years. (Yikes, my family almost moved to Paducah when I was a kid.)

We have a long term score card, but what’s our short term one?

He made a wish. Of every wish he could make, he would solve this one problem. More than vaccines, more than wishing leaders into office. He wants us to innovate to zero.

The presentation ended with Mr. Gates standing in front of a huge zero symbol, emblazoned against a beautiful shot of the earth and he garnered a standing ovation.

Well done, Mr. Gates. You’ve redeemed yourself.

For me, that is fantastic news. Many presenters have figured out how to build effective slides themselves. TED gives each presenter a copy of slide:ology. That, coupled with the raging success of Garr Reynolds’ books, a movement has started!

Most of the presentations had a clear message and the visuals amplified the talk instead of detracting from it. Graphics have been simplified and the presenters are well rehearsed. Even England’s Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, used slides that broke the “place title here, place bullets here” construct of Microsoft’s template defaults. Politicians + PowerPoint = Scary, but he did a great job.

Photo credit: TED / Richard Lewis

There were several sessions that identified the narrative in the data; instead of just showing the statistics, they gave them human context. Esther Duflo wants to see the same generous outpouring for poverty that we saw in Haiti.

People are moved by the magnitude of numbers more readily when there’s context to their magnitude.

One of my favorite moments was when Jamie Oliver scooped and then spilled a wheelbarrow of sugar cubes onto the stage, to show how the amount of sugar in the sweetened milk one student will drink during five years at school.

This is a classic S.T.A.R. moment, where he gave them Something They’ll Always Remember. He also showed videos of a kindergarten classroom where the children couldn’t identify what any vegetables were (i.e. tomato, potato, beets or cauliflower.) Here’s Jamie’s TEDPrize wish:

“I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.”

Day 1 was off to a wonderful start! There are plenty of ideas worth spreading.

Interestingly, each of the next few Fridays, Distinction Services will be posting the results of their annual executive survey of the impact of presentations on an executive’s career. Their first post from last Friday stated 86.1% of executives said “communicating with a solid level of clarity and confidence directly impacts my career and income.” See? It impacts their income. Ballmer could have made more last year if he’d invested more in his presentation.

Thank you for the tremendous participation in our survey [ http://blog.duarte.com/2010/02/product-launches-should-be-a-big-deal/] about Ballmer’s Window’s 7 launch presentation. Results were as expected. It was lousy.

Here’s the results:

Did he have a researcher or writer to help with his speech?

How many hours did he spend on content for their biggest launch in 10 years?

How many hours did he spend rehearsing his delivery?

Did he say any headline-worthy or tweet-worthy soundbites?

If you’re interested in working with us on a project, contact: info@duarte.com
If your question is specific to our workshops or webinars, send it to: training@duarte.com
For all things media-related, including speaking engagements, contact: tracy@duarte.com
All fan mail, and additional questions/comments go to: comments@duarte.com

We recently realized that “slideology@duarte.com” has been dropping emails into a black hole instead of our inbox, so if you’ve sent something in the last year, please send it again but one of the above addresses… we’re so sorry to have missed you.

I’d like to share one piece of mail that did make it through…because it is one of my absolute favorites. Admittedly I have received thank you notes on personal stationary from some cool people, like Phil Knight (Nike), Al Gore (VP), Warren Buffet (very rich nice dude), but this one takes the cake.

Isn’t that nice?

It’s from a guy named Scott Lynch who works at Sustain Dane, a nonprofit organization based in Madison, Wisconsin. He decided to apply slide:ology principals to his family’s holiday newsletter. He delivered the essential info of a holiday letter–what do you look like, what have you been up to, what are you thinking about? And to avoid the two pages of 10-point drivel, he made it visual so people with a 21st-century attention span could be entertained.

Great work Scott! Keep it up.

His book has also inspired a blog, to which Meryl Evans is a frequent contributor. Meryl recently interviewed Nancy Duarte on behalf of the Beyond Bullet Points blog. (Say that ten times fast.)

Nancy and Meryl chatted about what makes a presentation effective and memorable (a story), what makes a story good (it moves your audience), and why sketching and drawing at any skill level can make you a better presenter (it gets you thinking outside the box.) Nancy also shares a few of her favorite presentations, all of which can be viewed online.

Check out the interview here:
http://www.beyondbulletpoints.com/blog/?p=365

Each month I receive a publication called “Vital Speeches.” Last month’s issue included a transcript of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s launch presentation. Please don’t let this speech discredit the folks at Vital Speeches, it’s a great publication.

But really, couldn’t Microsoft’s herd of press folks have come up with a catchier title?

While writing the next book, I’ve been in speech analysis-mode, and have considered including an analysis on this speech as an example of what not to do… but I love PowerPoint too much to do that.

Below I’ve color-coded various sections of the speech, and included a poll so you can chime in at the end.

My first observation was that he refers to his audience as users, PCs, developers, and beta-testers. He could have called them all robots; none of those terms are very human. Next I noticed how much of the speech is allocated to conveying that that very same community built–or rather, fixed–the OS. He made it sound like they’re all building a camel instead of a visionary or revolutionary product. Oh, that’s right…they didn’t. I think this speech could be turned into a great object lesson for college (or high school) speech class.

Roll ‘em…

KEY:
Apple campaign reference

Unnecessary filler words or phrases

Confusing words, phrases or statistics.

Ballmer’s references to himself

Upgrade fixes problems

Bold statement with no supporting information

It is a great honor and privilege for me to have a chance to be here today. I’m an enthusiastic personality, I think. I get a little fired up about things. And I’ll tell you, there’s not much that gets me more fired up than the chance to start selling, delivering, and letting customers enjoy Windows 7.

So today Windows 7 is available—45,000 stores around the world. It’s available on new PCs, the upgrade is available, and it’s just out there for all to start, hopefully, to appreciate and enjoy as much as our 8 million beta testers have done.

So today I get to say not only that I’m Steve Ballmer and I’m a PC, but I’m Steve Ballmer, and I’m a Windows 7 PC effective immediately. What is Windows 7 at the end of the day? What were we really most trying to do? We were trying to make the everyday usage of the PC better in the ways our customers wanted: Simpler, faster, more responsive. And so for the billion people who use Windows, for the perhaps as many as 300 million people who may buy a PC during the course of the next 12 months, we want to give a chance for people to have a better and better experience and at the same time, enable a world of new opportunities, new applications to do new things that you’re going to have a chance to see and witness as you’re here with us today.

What’s special about Windows 7 and the way it came together and why I think we have a little extra special secret sauce somehow in the making of Windows 7. And it really came about from an intense collaboration between our own engineering organization and our partners, a group of about 50,000 partners, software vendors, hardware vendors, peripheral vendors, and our customers. And our customers. Whether it’s all of the data that we get back from customers about how they’re using Windows and what they’d like to see different and improved, whether it’s the feedback we got from the 8 million beta test customers, all of that came together in a very unique blend. 3,000 world-class engineers at Microsoft, 50,000 partners with umpity-ump engineers there, and then the 8 million customers. And the 8 million customers were people from all around the world, 200 countries. You had teachers, small business owners, soccer moms. You had people stretching, if you will, from grandparents to gamers, people stretching from Australia to Iceland. Across the planet, feedback coming in from people in all walks of life really helping us think about and improve and make Windows 7 and Windows 7 PCs what our customers, I think, will really, really want.

One of the favorite things that the development team did during the course of building Windows 7 is create this thing in one of the R&D buildings that they called The Wishing Wall. And on the Wishing Wall, they collected and put up just a ton of customer feedback. Things that they called technical feedback, emotional feedback, to try to really bring alive in the physical world all of that information that we were getting back in the virtual world to help us tune the product. And to all of our customers who participated in giving us that input and feedback, I really want to have a chance to thank the beta test customers, and I want to thank all of our Windows users as we’ve gone over the last several years and literally hundreds of millions of new people have bought new PCs with Windows Vista and Windows XP. They’ve given us a lot of feedback that has allowed us to build a product that I think takes things really to a very, very new level.

I talked about simplicity but I want to give you a little bit broader characterization of Windows 7 overall. I think of Windows 7 in three major buckets: No. 1, it works the way you want to work. You want that computer to fire up quickly, boom. You want it to feel responsive, boom. You want longer battery life, boom. We needed to make those things work — simpler, faster, more responsive, leaner, less busy. And I think we’ve accomplished that with Windows 7.

No. 2, the things that you do all the time need to be simpler. You want to manage the windows on your desktop, you want to find the documents you most frequently use. Let’s make that stuff super, super simple. And then No. 3, let’s enable a world of new things, new possibilities for software developers and hardware developers and for end users. So you get a technology like multi-touch, which enables people to build new computers and new software. You get literally, I would say, from an end user perspective, dozens or hundreds of new features. And our experience throughout the beta test program is that everybody finds their own unique set of features to fall in love with. A road warrior like me, I love the new wireless networking. Media lovers like my three teenage sons—well, one of them is a little younger than that—my three sons, they really love the home group features. And everybody finds, from an end user perspective, the things that delight them and we’ve enabled a whole new world of possibilities for the hardware and software community. And I think that forms kind of the essence of what Windows needs to be. Windows needs to be an incredible opportunity for innovation for hardware companies, software companies, and it needs to be a place that is simple and easy to use and opens up the world of diverse innovation for the end user in a way that is manageable and consumable by billions of people around the world. Windows 7 takes us a step closer to the vision that we articulate that focuses in around three different screen sizes—PC, phone, and TV—all connected and communicating across the cloud, the Internet backbone.

We launched a new generation of Windows phones a few weeks ago. Today, you’ll see how that connects in and fits in the Windows 7 environment. We’ll show you new approaches today to use Windows 7 PCs to power scenarios that are entertaining, that run on your television set. And so we continue to move down this path of allowing the intelligence and information that you expect to be across all of the devices in your world, at home and at work, giving you the information, the entertainment, and the socialization, in addition to the productivity that you would expect. We’ll have a chance to show you some of how this comes together in just a minute as Brad Brooks starts his demo.

Today is a very good day. But the center, I think, of the day is really the product itself. And so what I’d like to do now is to invite up on stage Brad Brooks, Vice President from our Windows Marketing Group, and Brad is going to give you a fairly extensive walk-through of the product that is Windows 7 and some of the new Windows 7 PCs.