Yesterday I tried out the methods of Beyond Power Points by Cliff Atkinson to create a presentation for a career counseling group. The topic was elevator speeches. I don't put much store in classic elevator speeches and marketing taglines for building business partnerships. I believe that women's natural tendency toward active listening and intution are better communication tools than elevator speeches, so that's what the Power Point was all about. The illustrations I used were from Daumier, Marie Cassatt, Andy Warhol, and most of them were by Georgia O'Keefe.
Atkinson recommends a Hollywood script-writing strategy and NO Bullet Points combined with evocative pictures. I had a fun time putting together the script and the slides. Knowing that the small group of women were going to be non-threatening, I wasn't nervous. They loved the presentation because it was short, focused, and beautifully illustrated. At the end of the meeting the group organizer offered me an information design consulting job to help revamp her training Power Points for a big corporation. Then four of us went out to First Thursday on SoCo and had a bottle of Sicilian white wine and calimari.
