Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

THE book you need

Customer Rating:

If you buy one book on designing presentations, make it this one. Nancy Duarte gives away all the secrets of her company, experts in designing and refining presentations for the likes of Al Gore. Where books like Presentation Zen (also recommended) give you a style to aim for, this focuses more on the basic tools and techniques. The coverage is simply breathtaking, including type, colour, grids, and even a basic primer on photographic composition. Reading this book, and applying the lessons in it, will change the way you view presentations. It will also change the way other people see you as a presenter. More than worth the money.

Worth your time and money

Customer Rating:

"Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations," by Nancy Duarte is a book that will change the way you think about your presentations. Almost anybody who has ever had to deliver a presentation would benefit in some way from reading this book. The structure of the book follows the process that you'll ideally use in the course of developing a presentation, from coming up with the presentation content itself to developing the slides. At every step of the way, Duarte explains not only how you should create your presentations (e.g. how graphs and charts should be presented), but also why your information should be presented that way. Following Duarte's advice results in a slide deck that supports and enhances your presentation, rather than having the deck detract from or (even worse) BE the presentation. The result is a presentation where there is actually a good reason for the existence and content of each slide. You might be thinking that you're not a designer, so you won't be able to create a presentation as good as some of the examples highlighted in the book, but you don't need to be a designer to improve your presentations. The book does cover some of the fundamentals of design (color theory, fonts, etc.), and does so in an approachable way, so the non-designers in the crowd (which is most of us) will get at least some information about design fundamentals to help you improve your presentations. A tiny nitpick is that I would have liked to see even more examples of "good" slides in the book - or even better, more examples of bad slides being turned into good ones. The case studies are great, but many of them are accompanied by an often full-page photo of the presenter. I'd have preferred to see that space given over to more images of the slides. Overall, I found this to be an excellent book that will easily and immediately reward the time you spend reading it.

The best and gorgeous book about presentation till now!	Customer Rating:
Not so much to read but in my opinion, this is just the strenghtness of the book.

A masterclass in communication, not just powerpoint

Customer Rating:

As other reviewers have pointed out, this is a stunning book where the messages leap clearly from the page. Ostensibly about presentation and using power point, the messages presented are easily transferable to other communications media such as advertising and the web. Whether you're about to give a presentation or not, you can use the information here to improve your communication skills in other media. Highly recommended for those wishing to improve their communication skills, using power point or other communication technologies.

Very good, but not quite 5 stars

Customer Rating:

This is a very good book, but not quite 5 stars worth. It is beautifully put together, as you would expect with such strong design principles. It is full of many real life examples and case studies. The ideas are always sound, and sometimes breathtaking. The lost star is that it moves so quickly from one idea to another, with the desire to make each idea palatable I assume. This succeeds, but the outcome is twofold. Firstly, as you are tantalised with a new area of interest it moves so quickly onto the next; I felt continually underfed. Secondly, it made the book feel a little fast-cut. Like some modern films that cannot hold shot for more than 3 seconds, it feels disjointed when really it isn't. So this is a lovely book, wonderfully put together, I just wish it had held onto some thoughts a little longer.