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.
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