Creating powerpoints is a task most people tend to dread. Hell, most people don’t like powerpoint slides when they’re viewing a presentation. They are stuffed with boring bullet points, images that add nothing to the presentation, and monotone speakers that knock you out like an Ambien.

This is the wrong way to approach a presentation. This is the wrong way to build a presentation, and this post is intended to help you build a killer presentation utilizing slides that keeps people on their toes and in baited breath for what you’re going to say next.

Using the example presentation below (it’s the slide set I used for my presentation at the Kellogg School of Business), I’m going to outline 12 tips for building unique slides for engaging and successful presentations. And as a side note, if you want to see this type of presentation in action, I will be speaking at the Facebook Developer Garage tomorrow (Feb. 20th) at the headquarters of Where I’ve Been.

The first rule is the most important – YOU are presenting, not the projector. If you put all of your points, thoughts, and statements on the slides, it will become the focus of the audience. Avoid this at all costs You want the audience to focus on you, not the presentation. Notice how I only use sentences when I’m posting quotes – I want people to focus on the sentences coming out of my mouth, not on the screen.

The corollary to rule #1 is to limit the amount of information on slides. You do NOT need to tell the story on the slides. In fact, it should be the opposite. The slides should only be a prompt, an image, a graph, or some other visual cue that either sums up what you’re talking about or is an aid to show information that is hard to digest orally. If a person has to take even 30 seconds to read an entire slide, you’ve lost them for several minutes, because they are not listening to you.
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I’m currently working on a talk I’m giving at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Business. The topic is Internet Entrepreurship in 2009: Where’s the Opportunity? And if you’re in Evanston on Tuesday, Feb 3rd at 12:15, Room 101, I’d love to see you there, at the talk or at some point that day.

I’m not going to give away what I will talk about. What I am going to talk about is one simple way to avoid one of my pet peeves: bad presentations

I talked about this in a previous (and popular) blog post, but the point of today’s article isn’t how to give a presentation, but rather this mindset: