Keynote envy
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008After my presentation at EuroPython I talked to Olle about using OpenOffice to
create slides that look nice. He said
I should write it down. So, here it is.
I have Keynote envy. That is, the main reason I think about getting a
mac every now and then is Keynote – the software
behind all the cool, jaw-dropping, world-changing, purple-cowish
presentations you see. Al Gore, Lawrence Lessig, Steve Jobs, you name
them, they use it. PowerPoint and OpenOffice presentations are
well known to be, to put it mildly, somewhat lacking in the looks
area.
But at some point I thought about it and realized there was very
little, if any, Keynote magic; I could do most of the stuff used in those
presentations (at least from the audience's point of view) using
OpenOffice. Which is cool, as it saves me money, time and grief (lots
of each) that would be necessary to switch platforms.
The main difference between Keynote- and OpenOffice/PowerPoint-powered
presentations is something of a tradition. Most of the speakers using
OO/PP come from the corporate or scientific world and must have seen a
lot of presentations in their lives, most of them dark-on-white to
save on printing costs, with lots of text, usually left-adjusted so
that all the lines of bullets are straight. This is how the style
propagates to new generations of OO/PP users.
This is also why all the free presentation templates I've found on the
web suck – they only fit this way of doing things.
To make a long story short, this is what worked well for me:
- bright text, dark backgrounds; this is easier on eyes than the
rectangle-of-bright-light and usually looks much better. For the
EuroPython talk I found a nice picture of a green school board on
the (most excellent) sxc.hu, cropped
it and played with saturation and brightness a bit. This makes
your life more difficult if you want to provide printed handouts,
but you can get pretty decent results with OpenOffice's
black-and-white print option (it is smart enough to reverse colors).The background might be hardly
visible if there is too much light in the room during the talk, but
it degrades nicely to black in those conditions. And looks great
on screen, too. - small amounts of text. I use slides as
starting points, something to elaborate on, and – after the talk
– a reminder what it was about to those who attended. Slides do
not have to contain all of the information I want to pass. Also,
reading from slides is a bad idea and having no text on them simply
removes the temptation. And it forces me to know the subject, not
just write and read about it, which makes the talk much better at
the expense of an obscene amount of preparation time.This also means getting rid of any unnecessary text on slides – I
used to put my name, the title of my talk and other information on
every single slide, but that is just noise.Some slides in my presentations are filled wall to wall with
source code. Those are the slides I spend the least time on
(literally just mentioning what it is and assuring the audience I
do _not_ want to explain it). The code is there just so that
people from the audience can look up the details if they feel like
it, but are otherwise free to ignore it (if there was more code, I
would rather publish it on a web page and leave only a link in the
presentation). - a lot of images – screenshots and photographs. Again, sxc.hu is an excellent source of
great quality photos. - no live coding, even when talking to software developers. It is
enough to show the important part of the code and its results (I
took screenshots from my text editor, for syntax highlighting) –
you pass the same amount of information without losing time on
typing, making mistakes and whoa-it-worked-just-an-hour-ago, so
your talk is denser. Watching someone editing files is simply
boring.Also, do what you can not to tempt the Murphy's law.
And that's it.
Oh yeah, I also used a wireless mouse as the remote. Worked fairly
well 
What I know I screwed up this time:
- I did not think about slideshare; pretty much all the projectors
nowadays have a resolution of 1024x768 or more so I made sure all
my screenshots look decent on them, but embedded slideshare objects
are much smaller. Something to consider. - contrast – on at least one of the slides (the one with imprezr
logo) there was too little contrast between the text (the 'r'
letter) and background. There is no problem when viewing on
screen, since you can distinguish the colors easily, but in a
bright room you lose saturation, so that contrast is much more
important than hue. - forgot to tell the audience to interrupt me at will – I talked
about several different ideas and wanted to discuss any questions
or suggestions during, not after the talk. Which is most of the
reason I finished 15 minutes early and then had half an hour
discussion immediately after that, before even unplugging my
laptop.
If you noticed something else I should fix, please let me know. Seriously
