While planning a talk about technical and legal aspects of secure data storage, I realized how “similar” my last presentations have been.

A friend gave me the hint to take a look on impress.js, an html5- and css3-based tool for making slides. While I was taking a look, I realized the following issues:

  1. I am neither fluent in html5 nor in css3.
  2. I have only 4 days left until my talk.
  3. I have no idea where to start.

Lucky me, I found in the sources a link to a book about presentations, called “Presentation Zen” from Garr Reynolds (http://www.presentationzen.com/). Reading through it, I realized most of my failures within my talks so far:

  • I spoke to fast.
  • I made to much bullets.
  • I obeyed to the Uni-CI.
  • My slides tend to speak for themselves.
  • I created my slides directly without less pen-and-paper planning.

This time, I tried to make it differently. Since, as I already said, I am not fluent in html5/css3 and I was massively lack of time, I created the slides with Omnigraffle inserting the images in impress.js only.

The talk is tomorrow but I wanted to share my experiences so far. I needed less time in refactoring the slides since I created them as a sketch on paper first and I used more metaphors: If someone is not able to follow my slides without listening the talk, then one should read the paper.

See the (intermediate) result here.

—UPDATE—

Omnigraffle and impress.js are not working good in presentation mode.

The resolution of the beamer damages everything since:

  1. Omnigraffle offers no vector-based output format which is supported out of the box by impress
  2. Impress has a strange behavior with fixed size images on different resolutions making the setup of the animations difficult

I think, you have to switch to html/css only to empower impress.

—UPDATE 2—

Last week I hold the talk (and two days later ad hoc a second time at a different event) and I must say: Why haven’t I tried to change my presentation style before?

  • I was exact in time (two times).
  • There was feedback from the audience within the talk (two times) making the talk more lively.
  • There was positive feedback about the talk itself after the talk (two times).
  • It was just fun as a presenter as well.
  • After all, it was not really more work to create the presentation (despite my struggles with impress.js and omnigraffle).

The creation of slides on a paper first enabled me to create my slides in the computer very fast with only minor modifications afterwards.