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slideology the art and science of creating great presentations
slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations
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List Price: $34.99
Our Price: $23.09
Your Save: $ 11.90 ( 34% )
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.452
EAN: 9780596522346
Format: Illustrated
ISBN: 0596522347
Label: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 294
Publication Date: 2008-08-12
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Studio: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
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Editorial Reviews:
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No matter where you are on the organizational ladder, the odds are high that you've delivered a high-stakes presentation to your peers, your boss, your customers, or the general public. Presentation software is one of the few tools that requires professionals to think visually on an almost daily basis. But unlike verbal skills, effective visual expression is not easy, natural, or actively taught in schools or business training programs. slide:ology fills that void.
Written by Nancy Duarte, President and CEO of Duarte Design, the firm that created the presentation for Al Gore's Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, this book is full of practical approaches to visual story development that can be applied by anyone. The book combines conceptual thinking and inspirational design, with insightful case studies from the world's leading brands. With slide:ology you'll learn to:
- Connect with specific audiences
- Turn ideas into informative graphics
- Use sketching and diagramming techniques effectively
- Create graphics that enable audiences to process information easily
- Develop truly influential presentations
- Utilize presentation technology to your advantage
Millions of presentations and billions of slides have been produced -- and most of them miss the mark. slide:ology will challenge your traditional approach to creating slides by teaching you how to be a visual thinker. And it will help your career by creating momentum for your cause.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Masters' Level Course in Creative Design for Presentations
Comment: Nancy Duarte's "slide:ology" is obviously a work of love. Nancy has poured her years of successful design and business experience developing presentations for many major companies into a book that beginners and experts alike will benefit from.
Beginners -- those who've been tasked with creating presentations despite the fact they don't have a creative bone in their bodies -- will find in these pages answers to the questions they hadn't thought of. They'll discover what to do, how to do it, why they should do it, when, where and most importantly, who to do it for. With clear prose and compelling graphics, Nancy offers examples and case studies that reinforce the theories and practices behind creating powerpoints that truly communicate. In this respect, it is truly a masters' course in developing successful presentations.
Professionals -- those who've got a background and/or training and experience in creating powerpoints -- NEED this book on their bookshelf next to those of Edward Tufte. It will remind you of why you do what you do and help freshen your approach and design thinking. It will give you ideas and help you advance your skills even as it helps you improve the success of your presentations.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A must-have for everybody creating presentations
Comment: If you ever need to give PowerPoint (Or Keynote) presentations, this book should be on your desk. Slide:ology, written by Nancy Duarte, is a well-designed and easily readable book that gives you an excellent overview on how to create great presentations. Hereby, the book focuses more on the generic concepts as slide:ology is not a dedicated step-by-step how-to book for using PowerPoint. Rather, it is more of a style book with highly inspirational qualities. In my opinion, the most valuable information gathered from the book is how it changed my way of thinking when preparing presentation slides.
I particularly liked the the chapter on color theory and typography; topics that are probably more often than not ignored by many professionals while preparing their slides. Another section that I thought was very good is `Classifying Diagrams' starting on page 44. This section provides a library of graphical forms and shapes that give you a good starting point for designing your own illustrations.
The book is loaded with case-studies and examples that tie together all those theoretical pieces of information quite nicely. For example Nancy Duarte's company Duarte Design helped Al Gore with his influential presentation about global warming.
As mentioned above, the book is fairly neutral in terms of presentation software used. Occasionally it provides some tips for using e.g. PowerPoint, but Slide:ology is fairly high-level in that regard. If you are looking for a more hands-on guide to use PowerPoint, you may want to look elsewhere.
Slide:ology certainly emphasizes the creative aspects of creating presentations, which is a good thing. Notwithstanding, one recommendation for improvement would be to include a chapter for the time- and/or resource-constrained presenter. Let's face it - in many organizations/departments, it might be difficult to nearly impossible to get your hands on a first-class designer who churns out those nice looking graphics as shown in Nancy Duarte's book. In that regard it would have been nice to have a chapter that addresses that issue.
Lastly, slide:ology also has its own website at www.slideology.com, which is essentially Duarte's company blog. Nevertheless, it contains a wealth of additional information and it is certainly a good companion to the book. Overall, I highly recommend this book. May it help reduce the vast amount of mediocre presentations out there.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Wife and I both loved it
Comment: My wife and I both read thru this book. Both of us are minorly visual people and do some design work in various mediums (me: web, her: sewing/arts and crafts).
The visuals and examples are all nice, and good testimonials.
The only thing I think was somewhat lacking, the book could have used a bit more text on color usage.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A good place to start
Comment: slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations
I enjoyed the book. It is well laid out with some really nice graphics and images to illustrate the points. The book covers basic design concepts with good examples on the do's and don'ts. I found the different iconic representations of abstract concepts in Chapter 3 particularly useful. The book is inspiring and by the time I reached the last page, I was looking forward to applying the new knowledge on my next presentation. The challenge though, would be to create amazing graphics like those in the book to inject the "wow" factor. I would have appreciated some mention on the tools used to produce the graphics in the book and how readers with no professional graphic design skills could bridge this gap.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Emperor's New Old Clothes
Comment: I had high hopes for this book. It looks very nice. It has the right nods to Tufte early on. But...
But the true content is very thin, includes a load of chart junk (the anti-Tufte - I guess the true cue is in the title, this is a PowerPoint book) and page after page of abstract diagrams demonstrating "flow" - much like the woeful second half of "Say it with Charts" which is about 50 pages of arrows.
Very very disappointing indeed.
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