2. About Kenny Nguyen
• Kenny Nguyen is the CEO/Founder of Big Fish
Presentations, a company whose mantra is “turning
presentations into experiences.” Kenny and his team
work daily with clients nationwide, from Fortune 100
level to startups, providing high quality presentation
design, training, and creative video. Kenny has been
featured on popular news outlets such as TEDx, Forbes,
Entrepreneur Magazine, Yahoo, Business Insider,
Mashable, Huffington Post, and the Washington Post.
Kenny was awarded the title of ‘2012 CEO Student
Entrepreneur of the Year’ by the nation's largest
collegiate entrepreneur organization CEO. Under Kenny’s
leadership, Big Fish Presentations was recently named
one of the top 50 student-led startups in the world by
the Kairos Society and also featured in Inc. Magazine’s
“Coolest College Start-ups of 2012.”
There is no distinct formulae for a perfect slide. You also don’t even need slides to be able to craft an excellent presentation. But if you do use slides, there are three things that I feel that makes a slide great. The best slides that I have seen are simple, understandable, and memorable.
Simple slides are just to the point. They don’t try to overload you with information, graphics, photos, or animations. People think that “Death by PPT” just means a lot of text on the slide. You can overload your audience with photos, graphics and other things that people think that make your slides better. So while we at BFP can’t always dilute all of our clients info, it is the first thing that we try to do.
Example – simplistic slide for our client telling the story of how she is able to take digital scans of peoples teeth, alter, and then make these virtual teeth the reality. Simplistic yet elegant graphics were used for this slide.
There are two easy ways to make your slides have simple content:
Cut down the amount you say on the slide (like Kenny mentioned), you can put the extra details in a handout or an appendix
Or split up your slides into more digestible bits. If you have 4 bullet points one one slide – and you actually go through all of the info, split it up into 4 smaller slides.
TEMPLATES
- We aren’t the biggest fan a template styles. This is the same header, same footer. Monotonous but easy. Give GE as example.
So look at your slides and ask yourself did I make this simplistic for my audience?
Understandable. Can they look at your slide and use it to understand what you are saying? Is it written well? Do the graphics actually make sense?
Understandable. This may seem like a lot, not so simple. But for our financial client, we needed to focus and make sure everything was understandable. They were introducing the state of the financial industry, telling a story about how 50% of the sales in the industry are made up of just 50 US companies. And of this we need to show what the different firms made up this sector – insurance, securities, and financial. The slide built as the presenter talked about each point.
Originally what we were delivered were 3 different bullet points and a pie chart. We needed make a slide full of text, more understandable.
Simple, understandable, but when you are on stage or presenting in front of a group of people – you are most likely trying to be more than just understandable. You want them to remember you and what they are saying. Many of the best slides are memorable. If you are trying to persuade or convince, many slides are memorable.
Let me set up this slide with a little context. So we were working on this presentation for a start-up called Harambee. They need to really stand out for a pitch at an even for the Clinton Global initiative. They were presenting to Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Nobel peace price winner, and even Bill Clinton was at the event himself. They were going to change the way less-developed countries were going to have access to eye care. They created a way to get kids eye glasses within just minutes for a very low cost. We created this slide as they explained the burden that these people were causing by not being given access to adequate eye card. We started off with this slide which was a little difficult to see, then we had the presenter click, and show how someone's eyesight could be changed after getting glasses. This slide was a memorable way to tell the story of the company.
Not all of these are going to be achieved for every single slide. For example – not every presentation is for a live audience. Many presentations are made to be emailed. My suggestion is to STOP using presentation for both. Emailing a document to describe all of the information to the reader is a completely different goal than sitting in front of a small/large group and quickly run through a presentation.
Most of the following tips are for live presentations, but many of the techniques can be used for sent presentations as well. In the q&a, you can ask me questions about the different suggestions between either if you would like.
