Powerpoint Design Quotes

What’s the first thing you should do when creating a PowerPoint presentation? If you’re like many people you’ll say, “Open PowerPoint.” Wrong answer. You should plan the story first. Just as a movie director storyboards the scenes before he begins shooting, you should create the story before you open the tool. You’ll have plenty of time to design pretty slides once the story is complete, but if the story is boring, you’ve lost your audience before you’ve spoken a word.

Well-designed visuals do more than provide information; they bring order to the conversation.

Still allergic to PowerPoints and formal presentations, he insisted that the people around the table hash out issues from various vantages and the perspectives of different departments. Because he believed that Apple's great advantage was its integration of the whole widget- from design to hardware to software to content-he wanted all departments at the company to work together in parallel. The phrases he used were "deep collaboration" and "concurrent engineering." Instead of a development process in which a product would be passed sequentially from engineering to design to manufacturing to marketing and distribution, these various departments collaborated simultaneously. " Our method was to develop integrated products, and that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative," Jobs said. This approach also applied to key hires. He would have candidates meet the top leaders-Cook, Tevanian, Schiller, Rubinstein, Ive- rather than just the managers of the department where they wanted to work. " Then we all get together without the person and talk about whether they'll fit in," Jobs said.

It is often said that a strategy is a choice or a decision. The words “choice” and “decision” evoke an image of someone considering a list of alternatives and then selecting one of them. There is, in fact, a formal theory of decisions that specifies exactly how to make a choice by identifying alternative actions, valuing outcomes, and appraising probabilities of events. The problem with this view, and the reason it barely lightens a leader’s burden, is that you are rarely handed a clear set of alternatives. In the case at hand, Hannibal was certainly not briefed by a staff presenting four options arranged on a PowerPoint slide. Rather, he faced a challenge and he designed a novel response. Today, as then, many effective strategies are more designs than decisions—are more constructed than chosen. In these cases, doing strategy is more like designing a high-performance aircraft than deciding which forklift truck to buy or how large to build a new factory. When someone says “Managers are decision makers,” they are not talking about master strategists, for a master strategist is a designer.

As we’ve seen, one of the most frequently pursued paths for achievement-minded college seniors is to spend several years advancing professionally and getting trained and paid by an investment bank, consulting firm, or law firm. Then, the thought process goes, they can set out to do something else with some exposure and experience under their belts. People are generally not making lifelong commitments to the field in their own minds. They’re “getting some skills” and making some connections before figuring out what they really want to do. I subscribed to a version of this mind-set when I graduated from Brown. In my case, I went to law school thinking I’d practice for a few years (and pay down my law school debt) before lining up another opportunity. It’s clear why this is such an attractive approach. There are some immensely constructive things about spending several years in professional services after graduating from college. Professional service firms are designed to train large groups of recruits annually, and they do so very successfully. After even just a year or two in a high-level bank or consulting firm, you emerge with a set of skills that can be applied in other contexts (financial modeling in Excel if you’re a financial analyst, PowerPoint and data organization and presentation if you’re a consultant, and editing and issue spotting if you’re a lawyer). This is very appealing to most any recent graduate who may not yet feel equipped with practical skills coming right out of college. Even more than the professional skill you gain, if you spend time at a bank, consultancy, or law firm, you will become excellent at producing world-class work. Every model, report, presentation, or contract needs to be sophisticated, well done, and error free, in large part because that’s one of the core value propositions of your organization. The people above you will push you to become more rigorous and disciplined, and your work product will improve across the board as a result. You’ll get used to dressing professionally, preparing for meetings, speaking appropriately, showing up on time, writing official correspondence, and so forth. You will be able to speak the corporate language. You’ll become accustomed to working very long hours doing detail-intensive work. These attributes are transferable to and helpful in many other contexts.

The aim is to get the students actively involved in seeking this evidence: their role is not simply to do tasks as decided by teachers, but to actively manage and understand their learning gains. This includes evaluating their own progress, being more responsible for their learning, and being involved with peers in learning together about gains in learning. If students are to become active evaluators of their own progress, teachers must provide the students with appropriate feedback so that they can engage in this task. Van den Bergh, Ros, and Beijaard (2010: 3) describe the task thus: Fostering active learning seems a very challenging and demanding task for teachers, requiring knowledge of students’ learning processes, skills in providing guidance and feedback and classroom management. The need is to engage students in this same challenging and demanding task. The suggestion in this chapter is to start lessons with helping students to understand the intention of the lesson and showing them what success might look like at the end. Many times, teachers look for the interesting beginning to a lesson – for the hook, and the motivating question. Dan Willingham (2009) has provided an excellent argument for not thinking in this way. He advocates starting with what the student is likely to think about. Interesting hooks, demonstrations, fascinating facts, and likewise may seem to be captivating (and often are), but he suggests that there are likely to be other parts of the lesson that are more suitable for the attention-grabber. The place for the attention-grabber is more likely to be at the end of the lesson, because this will help to consolidate what has been learnt. Most importantly,Willingham asks teachers to think long and hard about how to make the connection between the attention-grabber and the point that it is designed to make; preferably, that point will be the main idea from the lesson. Having too many open-ended activities (discovery learning, searching the Internet, preparing PowerPoint presentations) can make it difficult to direct students’ attention to that which matters – because they often love to explore the details, the irrelevancies, and the unimportant while doing these activities. One of Willingham's principles is that any teaching method is most useful when there is plenty of prompt feedback about whether the student is thinking about a problem in the right way. Similarly, he promotes the notion that assignments should be primarily about what the teacher wants the students to think about (not about demonstrating ‘what they know’). Students are very good at ignoring what you say (‘I value connections, deep ideas, your thoughts’) and seeing what you value (corrections to the grammar, comments on referencing, correctness or absence of facts). Thus teachers must develop a scoring rubric for any assignment before they complete the question or prompts, and show the rubric to the students so that they know what the teacher values. Such formative feedback can reinforce the ‘big ideas’ and the important understandings, and help to make the investment of

A word of explanation about how the information in this book was obtained, evaluated and used. This book is designed to present, as best my reporting could determine, what really happened. The core of this book comes from the written record—National Security Council meeting notes, personal notes, memos, chronologies, letters, PowerPoint slides, e-mails, reports, government cables, calendars, transcripts, diaries and maps. Information in the book was supplied by more than 100 people involved in the Afghanistan War and national security during the first 18 months of President Barack Obama’s administration. Interviews were conducted on “background,” meaning the information could be used but the sources would not be identified by name. Many sources were interviewed five or more times. Most allowed me to record the interviews, which were then transcribed. For several sources, the combined interview transcripts run more than 300 pages. I have attempted to preserve the language of the main characters and sources as much as possible, using their words even when they are not directly quoted, reflecting the flavor of their speech and attitudes. Many key White House aides were interviewed in-depth. They shared meeting notes, important documents, recollections of what happened before, during and after meetings, and assisted extensively with their interpretations. Senior and well-placed military, intelligence and diplomatic officials also provided detailed recollections, read from notes or assisted with documents. Since the reporting was done over 18 months, many interviews were conducted within days or even hours after critical discussions. This often provided a fresher and less-calculated account. Dialogue comes mostly from the written record, but also from participants, usually more than one. Any attribution of thoughts, conclusions or feelings to a person was obtained directly from that person, from notes or from a colleague whom the person told. Occasionally, a source said mid-conversation that something was “off-the-record,” meaning it could not be used unless the information was obtained elsewhere. In many cases, I was able to get the information elsewhere so that it could be included in this book. Some people think they can lock up and prevent publication of information by declaring it “off-the-record” or that they don’t want to see it in the book. But inside any White House, nearly everyone’s business and attitudes become known to others. And in the course of multiple, extensive interviews with firsthand sources about key decision points in the war, the role of the players became clear. Given the diversity of sources, stakes and the lives involved, there is no way I could write a sterilized or laundered version of this story. I interviewed President Obama on-the-record in the Oval Office for one hour and 15 minutes on Saturday, July 10, 2

Were these slides the visual support for a live oral presentation? If so, I sympathized with the audience. Since when can an audience read and listen to someone talk at the same time (even if they could actually see the 12-point text on the screen well enough to read it)? Were the slides used merely as a kind of document printed in PowerPoint? If so, I pitied both the author and the reader because PowerPoint is not a tool for document creation. Boxes of bullet points and logos do not make for a good handout or report.

Studies have actually shown that people who simply listen to a presentation retain more content than if they hear and read the content simultaneously.

Ensure that the first thing that your audience sees or hears is related to them and leaves a question in their mind.

It is natural for human beings to dislike having an open question in their mind.

Many design tools in Keynote and PowerPoint are quite useful, but the 3D tool is one I could very well do without.

Now that computers can write and design ads, we can get down to the real business of advertising -- you know, meetings and downloads and uploads and briefings and off-sites and Powerpoints and metrics and brand audits and deep dives. We

In her book Grit, social psychologist Angela Duckworth identifies the single quality that most marks those who succeed in life, those who feel fulfilled, from those who find life one long series of frustrations. The quality boils down to this: the understanding that your personality and character are not fixed but can be shaped and strengthened by overcoming difficult experiences. There are voices in everyone’s head that resist that fact, that tell us we will never achieve this or that, so there is no point in even trying. Again, our business was designed to help silence a few of those voices. One of the questions we asked ourselves when we created Tough Mudder was this: How do you create a culture and an authentic experience that will reliably deliver grit, a quality that people seem to crave but don’t know how to find? This craving, our grit-shaped hole, feels like a recent phenomenon. It is a by-product perhaps of our fortune in living, in the Western world at least, in largely peaceful times, when work is more likely to involve generating a PowerPoint presentation than any kind of hard labor. When—to put it in blunt evolutionary terms—millennia of hunting and gathering have been replaced by a trip to the supermarket. Ease and convenience are great in their way, but for many of us life no longer routinely presents the kind of challenges that once developed resilience—and genetically, psychologically, I believe we miss those challenges. In most other times and places those trials came hard and fast, and though we might not always have welcomed them, they allowed us to show what we were capable of, gave us a sense of purpose in ourselves, and a sense of belonging in our community.

Welcome to 16X9. We’ve earned a reputation as one of the world’s top presentation design firm — recognized by leaders in tech, healthcare, and financial services, to name a few. At 16X9, we deliver what our clients expect: perfection. In fact, quality is one of our greatest virtues — it’s why some of our clients have referred to us as “PowerPoint wizards” and we’re fun to work with, too.

We took all the old-world systems and digitized them. Skeuomorphism, the design concept of making digital items resemble their real-world counterparts, was a way to aid the transition into the new era. Mail became e-mail, with ‘addresses’ and inboxes. We made ‘folders’ and ‘trash’ and ‘desktops’ as digital equivalents. PowerPoint had ‘slides’ like early slide projectors and floppy disks represented ‘saving’, which is wonderfully anachronistic, as is ‘return’ which stands for ‘carriage return’ from typewriters – and don’t even start me on ‘cc’ for carbon copy.

It is often said that a strategy is a choice or a decision. The words “choice” and “decision” evoke an image of someone considering a list of alternatives and then selecting one of them. There is, in fact, a formal theory of decisions that specifies exactly how to make a choice by identifying alternative actions, valuing outcomes, and appraising probabilities of events. The problem with this view, and the reason it barely lightens a leader’s burden, is that you are rarely handed a clear set of alternatives. In the case at hand, Hannibal was certainly not briefed by a staff presenting four options arranged on a PowerPoint slide. Rather, he faced a challenge and he designed a novel response. Today, as then, many effective strategies are more designs than decisions—are more constructed than chosen. In these cases, doing strategy is more like designing a high-performance aircraft than deciding which forklift truck to buy or how large to build a new factory. When someone says “Managers are decision makers,” they are not talking about master strategists, for a master strategist is a designer. THE

Brian Chesky sends to all Airbnb employees is a powerful one. “You have to continue to repeat things” Brian told our class at Stanford. “Culture is about repeating, over and over again, the things that really matter for your company.” Airbnb reinforces these verbal messages with visual impact as well. Brian hired an artist from Pixar to create a storyboard of the entire experience of an Airbnb guest, from start to finish, emphasizing the customer-centered design thinking that is a hallmark of its culture. Even Airbnb conference rooms tell a story; each one is a replica of a room that’s available for rent on the service. Every time Airbnb team members hold a meeting in one of those rooms, they are reminded of how guests feel when they stay there. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos famously bans PowerPoint decks and insists on written memos, which are read in silence at the beginning of each meeting. This memo policy is one of the ways that Amazon encourages a culture of truth telling. Memos have to be specific and comprehensive, and those who read the memos have to respond in kind rather than simply sit through some broad bullet points on a PowerPoint deck and nod vague agreement. Bezos believes that memos encourage smarter questions and deeper thinking. Plus, because they’re self-contained (rather than requiring a person to present a deck), they are more easily distributed and consumed by a wider population within Amazon. The late Steve Jobs used architecture as a core part of his deliberate communications strategy at Pixar. He designed Pixar headquarters so that the front doors, main stairs, main theater, and screening rooms all led to the atrium, which contained the café and mailboxes, ensuring that employees from all departments and specialties would see people from other groups on a regular basis, thus reinforcing Pixar’s collaborative, inclusive culture.

Bruce Horn: I thought that computers would be hugely flexible and we could be able to do everything and it would be the most mind-blowing experience ever. And instead we froze all of our thinking. We froze all the software and made it kind of industrial and mass-marketed. Computing went in the wrong direction: Computing went to the direction of commercialism and cookie-cutter. Jaron Lanier: My whole field has created shit. And it’s like we’ve thrust all of humanity into this endless life of tedium, and it’s not how it was supposed to be. The way we’ve designed the tools requires that people comply totally with an infinite number of arbitrary actions. We really have turned humanity into lab rats that are trained to run mazes. I really think on just the most fundamental level we are approaching digital technology in the wrong way. Andy van Dam: Ask yourself, what have we got today? We’ve got Microsoft Word and we’ve got PowerPoint and we’ve got Illustrator and we’ve got Photoshop. There’s more functionality and, for my taste, an easier-to-understand user interface than what we had before. But they don’t work together. They don’t play nice together. And most of the time, what you’ve got is an import/export capability, based on bitmaps: the lowest common denominator—dead bits, in effect. What I’m still looking for is a reintegration of these various components so that we can go back to the future and have that broad vision at our fingertips. I don’t see how we are going to get there, frankly. Live bits—where everything interoperates—we’ve lost that. Bruce Horn: We’re waiting for the right thing to happen to have the same type of mind-blowing experience that we were able to show the Apple people at PARC. There’s some work being done, but it’s very tough. And, yeah, I feel somewhat responsible. On the other hand, if somebody like Alan Kay couldn’t make it happen, how can I make it happen?

When you tapped the zoom button on our iPad demo, the keyboard you were looking at (say, mine) transitioned to the other one (his), much like clicking to go to the next slide in presentation software like Keynote or PowerPoint. The image of one keyboard disappeared to nothingness to reveal the other underneath. Bas added scaling to his animation—the keys of the departing keyboard changed size to match the one coming into view. He also tuned the timing of the animation, so it started slowly and sped up as it went, making you feel you had definitively landed once the animation finished. These effects were subtle, given that his animation was a mere fraction of a second, but Bas had a way of making these details count. When you looked at this zoom key animation, it appeared as if the keyboards were undergoing a complex morph. They weren’t. From an engineering perspective, this was significant, since the simplicity of the design meant I could write the code for his animation in just a couple hours. The magic was in the overall effect. The animation didn’t look like clicking from one slide to another in a presentation deck. When you tapped on the zoom button, it made you feel like one keyboard was becoming the other. The effect registered viscerally. It was exactly the kind of self-explanatory touch that made Apple software easy to use.