Another fantastic TEDTalk. Lead like a conductor.

Which conducting style has your boss?

I am really passionate about presentations and presentation design. Why? Simple, I hate wasting people's time! Imagine you are doing a one hour presentation in front of 24. If your presentation is boring then you just wasted one day of a persons lifetime!

So how can you make sure that you do not bore people to death with your presentations? Well, there are a couple of ways. First of all make sure to check out presentation zen. Garr Reynolds is the brain behind the site and it has lots of great tips on how to become better at presenting something. Perhaps the best advise I got from Garr was to look at public advertisements as an inspiration for crafting a message.

Everybody knows that people do not look at boring things. However what could be more boring then your standard slide featuring a list of bullet points on a white background. Even the interestingness of your flashy company logo will not save you if you serve one boring slide after another.

So everyday while waiting for your bus or train, look out for advertisements which make you look. Then think about why you like them and how they caught your attention. Was it the typeface, an interesting image or the composition?

You might say "Wait a second but I am not selling any goods with my presentations so why should I dress them up like an advertisement", well, in a way you are always selling something. It might be an idea, inspiration or you want to make people think about a certain topic.

So have a look around and see if you can find some inspirations. They might help you to make your slides a little bit better.

Fortunately I see more and more people who abandon their boring bullet-point overloaded slides and switch over to more visual slides. However once you make the decision to use images for illustrating your thoughts you might ask yourself where you can find them. My favorite source for images by far is Flickr, an online photo site.

A lot of photographers on Flickr release their pictures under the Creative Commons license thereby giving you the right to use these pictures under certain conditions e.g. the author usually asks you to clearly state who generated the content.

In order to find pictures which are covered by the CC license make sure to use Flickr's advanced search. See the following screenshot.

The following slides are from a presentation I gave on unit testing and use pictures from Flickr. They should give you a good idea of the image quality you can get and what you can do with them.

For more ideas regarding stock images hop over to presentation zen.

It is always interesting what kind of pictures you find when you search for images on Flickr. I found this one while I was searching for an image which relates to the topic: deadline

Fits it quite nicely. (Picture by x-eyedblonde)

Some time ago Stefan Sagmeister showcased a funny guerrilla art project on TED. The artist sticks speech bubbles onto public advertisement and then the pedestrians fill the blank spots with their own thoughts.

In his talk he showed a lot of funny bubbles already however there is also a website which allows you to browse throw a lot of those bubbles and some of them are truly hilarious. Have a look.

Photo courtesy of Bubble Project