Presentation Zen

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynold is a book about creating presentations with software like Microsoft PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress. How it differs from other books on the subject is that it asks you to reject the templates that comes with these software, and to instead think "less is more".

The ideas in this book emphasize that the visual aspect of a presentation can be ruined by using too many graphical objects on each chart. This is often the case with casual users who become enamoured by the capabilities of the presentation software they are using, and then proceed to make the mistake of including as many widgets as they can on each chart. Reynold gives many refreshing ideas on how a good presentation should look like, and refers to slideshows by Steve Jobs as well as those on TED as examples of how a good presentation should be done.

Reynold has a web site at  www.presentationzen.com that expands on the ideas in his book.