Garr Reynolds' new book!

After his breakthrough book, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, Garr Reynolds brings us another offering to the presentation design altar, Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations. If you enjoyed his first book, you should like his second book. I agree with other reviewers that it isn’t the same breakthrough as his first Presentation Zen book was, but it is a worthy follow-up book for fans of his blog and anyone who does presentation design on a regular basis. Overall, I give this book four out of five stars.

Highlights of Presentation Zen Design

More of the same from Garr Reynolds, which is a good thing in my mind. (c) Thinkstock

As I mentioned, if you liked Reynolds’ first book, you get more of the same stuff you love in this book: emphasis on simplicity, stock photography, white space, no bullet points, fundamental design principles, interesting slide examples, etc. Going through Presentation Zen Design was a good refresher or reminder on what’s important for designing a strategic, keynote-style presentation.

In Presentation Zen Design, Garr Reynolds focuses on some new topics that were not covered in his first book: color, type, video, and data. All of these subjects were covered to varying degrees by Nancy Duarte in her Slide:ology book, and it’s nice to see Reynolds devote entire chapters to these key topics as I value his opinion on them.

Besides the helpful design suggestions from Garr Reynolds, in Presentation Zen Design you also get a great collection of featured experts, who provided useful insights on a variety of presentation-related topics. Some of these experts included David Rose (VC pitches), Nancy Duarte (storyboarding), John McWade (imagery), Scott Kelby (photography), and Stephen Few (data visualization). I felt as though these subject matter experts nicely complemented Reynolds’ content.

Criticisms of Presentation Zen Design

Throw on some wasabi, and I could eat Japanese culture all day long. (c) Thinkstock

I’m a big fan of Japan and its amazing culture (e.g., sushi, ninjas, samurais, anime, tech gadgets, politeness, etc.). I’ve even been fortunate enough to have visited Japan three times in my life. Although the Japanese cultural references used throughout the book provided interesting visuals and a common theme, I don’t feel as though they pulled their weight in terms of better explaining Reynolds’ presentation design concepts or main points. In fact, I felt as though the various features on wagasa (umbrellas), tokonoma (interior design), and zen aesthetic principles were mostly tangential at best (nonessential as Garr would say) and detracted from the efficacy of the book.

Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte, Seth Godin, and other keynote presentation-focused experts seem to believe one approach fits all situations. For strategic presentations, a Presentation Zen Design approach is fantastic. What about the non-strategic, tactical slide decks that most presenters are dealing with on a day-to-day basis? Do we need remove all of the bullet points, use heavy amounts of stock images, and create handouts for all tactical presentations as well? For many tactical presentations, a pure Presentation Zen Design approach will be expensive, time-consuming, and ill-suited. Several of Reynolds’ design principles still apply to tactical presentations, but readers are unfortunately left to figure it out on their own.

My final minor criticism relates to the slide examples included in this latest book from Garr Reynolds. In his first book, I really enjoyed all of the interesting slide examples from various presenters, especially the before and after examples. I found it really helpful to see a poorly-designed slide side by side with a well-designed version. In Presentation Zen Design, I didn’t feel as though there were enough before and after examples, which was a little disappointing. In addition, there were too many slide examples from the same presentation design firm (Duarte Design). I would have preferred a greater variety of sample work from different professional and non-professional presentation designers. Nancy Duarte’s team is very talented, but I wanted to see a richer variety of styles and approaches.

Besides a slight Apple Keynote bias in Presentation Zen Design, Garr Reynolds’ second book builds upon the core concepts outlined in his first book. Overall, I believe Presentation Zen Design is definitely a good addition to your business book library if you regularly build presentations in your current role.

Miter joints are new in PPT 2007. (c) Thinkstock

If you regularly use shapes and lines in your PowerPoint presentations, you should be familiar with the standard line style options such as width, dash type, and compound style. All of these options were in PowerPoint 2003 and have carried over to the latest version of PowerPoint. In PowerPoint 2007, they have added a couple of new options that you should be aware of  — join type and cap type.

Join Type

I was recently trying to create an explosion shape, and the points of the explosion just didn’t look crisp. As I started exploring in the options, I found that the join type was the culprit.

In PowerPoint 2007, your default setting for join type is round. There are two other options for join type — bevel and miter. In the image below, you can see the differences between each join type on the lightning bolt shape.

For explosions and lightning bolts (any shapes with sharp angles), the miter join is the way to go.

The miter join works well with any shapes with sharp or right angles such as squares, rectangles, etc. For example, I used the miter join for my explosion shape, and it looked much better than the default round join. The bevel join looks like someone clipped off the corner of the angle. The differences between the join types aren’t as noticeable if you’re using a thin line width (< 1 pt), but can be very noticeable if you’re using a very thick line width (> 3 pt).

Cap Type

Once I discovered the effect of the join type setting, I became curious about the cap type setting. The cap type setting is only used with open shapes (e.g., lines), not closed shapes (e.g., squares). The cap type controls the endings of lines as well as the format of dashed lines. The default setting is flat, and you have two other settings — square and round. In the image below, you can compare the effect of each setting:

The flat and square settings are so similar, we probably didn't need both options.

There’s not really a huge difference between the flat and square options. The square option lengthens the line a little beyond the end points, but that’s about it as far as I can tell. The round option creates rounded end points for a line, and if it is a dashed line then each of the dashes will be rounded as well. I wish the arrow point on a line could have been rounded as well, but it isn’t changed by the cap type setting.

How to access line style settings

Most of these options should be familiar.

If you’d like to adjust the line style settings on one of your lines or shapes, you need to right-click on the object. On the pop-up menu, select Format Shape which is at the bottom of the menu. On the subsequent menu, select the Line Style tab from the left-hand side. You’ll then see the different line style options including the new join and cap type options. Good luck!

Add a tapered "swoosh" arrow to your slides.

Back in December 2008, I published an article on how to create “sexy” curved arrows in PowerPoint 2007. I never thought that particular post would become one of my most popular articles. It highlights a problem within PowerPoint 2007 where you can no longer edit and curve the default arrows. The article shows you a workaround approach that enables you to create a nice flowing — dare I say “sexy” — curved arrow in PowerPoint 2007.

In this Part II article, I’d like to add to your curved arrow technique to your PowerPoint design toolbox — the curved swoosh arrow. It’s a little more work to create than the “standard” sexy curved arrow, but I think the effect might be worth the extra effort in some situations.

What are my arrow options in PowerPoint?

Before I introduce the swoosh arrow technique, I’d to review the different types of arrow options that you have in PowerPoint 2007 and show how there’s a void that the swoosh arrow fills.

You have many arrow options in PowerPoint. However, you probably only use a handful of them regularly.

As mentioned, the default arrow is only good for straight lines — you can’t edit or curve it. Some people like to use the elbow arrow connectors. I rarely use them because I find the connectors difficult to work with and the connectors (not the objects) can’t be aligned so they often end up looking messy. You also can’t curve the connectors.

The directional (up, down, left, and right) block arrows are straightforward and very useful, and I use them frequently. However, the curved and circular block arrows usually end up looking too chunky, skewed, or generally awkward-looking so I typically just use sexy curved arrows in their place.

Enter the Swoosh Arrow

You can have fun with a swoosh arrow. Maybe I got a little too much air time on this one. (c) Shutterstock

When you look at all of the Arrow options in PowerPoint 2007, you’ll notice that all of the arrows basically have a uniform thickness. Sometimes you’d like to create a more dynamic arrow to highlight or emphasize a particular aspect of your presentation. A swoosh arrow provides a more dramatic, tapered effect than a simple curved arrow. Let’s walk through the steps to creating a curved swoosh arrow.

Step 1: Create a directional block arrow

Create a block arrow.

The first step is create a directional block arrow. The key is to size the arrow so the head of the arrow is the right size for the swoosh arrow. If you find that you haven’t sized your arrow correctly, then in most cases you’re going to have to start over so it’s important to get the arrow’s head size correct.

If you are creating a series of swoosh arrows and want them to have uniformly sized heads, you’ll want to make several duplicates of the block arrow once it is sized properly.

Step 2: Rotate the arrow to the desired angle

Rotate with the green handle.

Focusing on the arrow head, you want to make sure it is rotated to the desired entry position. It’s important to position the arrow head correctly because you want to avoid having to adjust things later on when it would be messier and more work to fix.

Step 3: Convert the arrow into a Freeform shape

Now we need to convert the arrow into a Freeform shape so that it can be transformed into a swoosh arrow. First, you select the arrow by left-clicking on it. Second, you click on the Drawing Tools > Format tab on the Ribbon. Third, on the far left you should see the Edit Shape option within the Insert Shapes module. Click on the Edit Shape dropdown menu and select Convert to Freeform to change the arrow into an editable Freeform shape.

You could draw a curved swoosh arrow, but it's way easier to just convert a block arrow into a swoosh arrow.

Step 4: Edit the block arrow’s shape

With the arrow being a Freeform shape, we can edit its corner points to create a curved swoosh arrow. In order to edit the arrow shape, right-click on the arrow and select Edit Points. With the end points showing, you can now reposition the starting points of your arrow. You’re going to need to use the handles to adjust the angles of the corner points of the arrow to create the desired curve for the swoosh arrow. You can keep both of the starting corner points or delete one of them so the arrow starts from a single point instead.

I would recommend not touching the front three edit points that form the “V” of the arrow head. If you start playing with them you can ruin the integrity of the arrow. It will begin to fall apart like a cheap tent that has had its support poles removed.

Right-click on the arrow shape and then you'll be able to create the swoosh arrow.

Swoosh arrows may not always be worth the extra effort compared to that of regular sexy curved arrows. Most of the time a simple curved arrow will communicate just fine, and you don’t necessarily want arrows to stand out. However, when an arrow is important to what you’re trying to communicate and it needs a little extra flair or panache, the swoosh arrow can be a great option.

SmartArt is not PowerPoint + Bob Ross.

PowerPoint is often criticized for encouraging presenters to rely too heavily on bullet points and not helping people to communicate more visually. Microsoft added a feature known as SmartArt to help convert text into various stylized graphics. When you’re designing your PowerPoint presentation, you can quickly rotate through various shapes, colors, layouts, and styles in order to find the right graphic for your presentation.

For novice or casual PowerPoint users, SmartArt can be a handy tool for quickly making your presentation more visual and professional looking. If you decide to use SmartArt in your PowerPoint slides, you need to be careful because SmartArt is dumb. More…

Must...finish...this...presentation. (c) Shutterstock

It’s getting late, and you’re the last one in the office besides the late-night cleaning crew. With the soft buzz of a distant vacuum in your ear, you wonder how you’re going to bring everything together in time for tomorrow’s big presentation. You stare blankly at the empty slide in front of you, thinking just a few more slides and you’ll be done. Two hours later, tired and hungry, you’ve made some progress (if you call one mediocre slide progress) and even the cleaning crew has gone home now. More…