Presentation Summit 2023: Conversation with Mike Parkinson

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      Mike Parkinson is a geek. He is one of thirty-six Microsoft PowerPoint MVPs in the world, a CPP APMP Fellow, best-selling author, keynote speaker, and an industry thought leader. Mike owns Billion Dollar Graphics and is a partner at 24 Hour Company, a premier creative services firm.

In this conversation, Mike talks about his participation at the upcoming Presentation Summit 2023, being held on location in Monterey, CA this year from October 15 to 18, 2023, and virtually from November 5 to 8, 2023.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: Mike, for both of your sessions at the Presentation Summit, Super-Simple Slide Designs and Fabulous Fonts and Terrific Type, could you please provide separate explanations on how each session will benefit slide creators and why they should attend them?

Mike: Less is best in Super-Simple Slide Design. In this session, I show attendees how to make professional slides and presentations as efficiently as possible. They will learn to eliminate clutter and unnecessary content while meeting their slides’ objectives. I will give them the latest techniques and tools that ensure their presentations are fresh and modern.

In Fabulous Fonts and Terrific Type, attendees will learn how to make better presentations, improve accessibility, and get fresh design ideas. Slide creators also avoid the weird technical issues that come from choosing the wrong fonts. We will uncover good and bad font types and see which font families improve or hurt legibility. I’ll provide tips and techniques to make beautiful, professional slides quickly with free fonts. Also, attendees will learn to use different fonts effectively to enhance the visual appeal and impact of their presentations. Don’t miss this geeky and inspirational session!

Geetesh: As someone who regularly delivers sessions and interacts with numerous users and designers, what is one specific quality, aspect, or perspective that slide designers often overlook? Furthermore, what steps can they take to incorporate that quality into their content?

Mike: Slide designers often overlook empathy. What I mean by empathy is seeing the content and design from the learner’s perspective. Here is where this aspect gets complicated: even if the designer has empathy, the author often doesn’t. It then becomes the designer’s job to help the author see their content and aesthetic choices from the audience’s perspective. Doing so is not easy. Most slides fail because they are created by the author for the author with the author’s (and/or designer’s) personal biases informing most of their choices. This design strategy usually doesn’t align with their learner’s needs and preferences.

The solution is to follow a process that includes the learner’s perspective early in the development process. For example, after you determine your objective (the goal of the slide or slide deck), determine how you can present this information to help the learner care about the content. How can you summarize and communicate your content to engage the learner both emotionally and intellectually? If your objective is to help your audience become more self-sufficient at work, then you might say, “Make your job easier with these three company tools.” A variation of this statement becomes the slide title. The slide then needs to prove that statement.

Doing this simple, yet seldom done, process weaves empathy into slide development.

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