Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc. is widely regarded as one of the masters of the fine art of presentation. Check out his recent launch of the new iPad at http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1001q3f8hhr/event/index.html to see why.
He seems very casual, and at ease. But watch carefully. Notice that he knows his presentation down pat. Every time he touches his remote, he knows exactly what slide is coming next. I guarantee, the reason he is so at ease is because he has rehearsed his presentation down to the most minute detail.
Let’s talk about his slides. Notice how simple they are. The backgrounds are almost completely plain, just a light coloured gradient, so any text is clean and easy to read. And there is not much text! At most one or two lines, and in many cases, just one big number filling the whole screen. And the graphics are great too. Simple, easy to see images, and in most cases, nothing else on the screen but a single image.
Did you notice his use of slide transitions. I am sure that Mr. Jobs used Apple’s own Keynote presentation software. A cool thing about Keynote is its dozens of awesome transitions and animations. But Jobs only uses a few. Most of the slides use no animated transition at all. The only animated transitions mark spots where there is a topic change.
The presentation only uses animated text in two places, once to highlight the 3 billionth download from the applications store, and once to announce the price of the iPad. That’s 2 instances of animated text in the whole presentation!
Steve Jobs is clearly quite confident, and doesn’t feel the need to hog the stage through the whole presentation. He freely turns things over to members of his team, and a few guests. But he clearly insisted that his fellow presenters were as rehearsed and prepared as he was. Everyone in the presentation was confident and competent.
So there you have it, an opportunity to learn from one of the masters!
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