Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter)

To say "Presentation Zen" is the best book on creating an effective presentation since Jerry Weissman's "Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story" is an understatement. What Garr Reynolds' book accomplishes is to furnish presenters with the tools to make presentations fun and enjoyable again.

Armed with an arsenal against the use of bullets and an army of arguments for the use of compelling visuals, Reynolds walks the talk by making his own book very visually oriented, starting with the presentation-based preface by Guy Kawasaki.

After reading it, I was able to transform a presentation I was going to deliver later this month, packing the essentials of my pitch into 7 slides, none of which had bullets and most of which contained powerful visuals that support the story I will be telling the audience. This change was possible thanks to the advice on this book, so I highly recommend it to any presenter or teacher who wants to breathe life into a presentation.

It doesn't matter what your job is, this is a must read.

We so often forget that the simplest thing is often the best. This book shows how people can get back to basic. I love the fact that this book captures the essence of why effective presenters are so good!

this is truly a great book. Very inspiring. Most presentations today are boring, uninspiring, not to the point. This book truly motivates you to focus on the parts that matter in your presentation, the points that you want to get across. Concise book with good pictures, graphs etc. I also recommend Garr's blog www.presentationzen.com - that's how I became aware of the book in the first place. Definitely worth the read!

I finally had a chance to read Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. Garr is a leading authority on presentation design and delivery, advocating his minimalist (or "Zen") approach to presentations. His blog is one of the most visited web sites on the subject.

That's what 50% of this book is about, convincing the army of business managers writing thousands of PowerPoint presentations every day to drop their bullet point slides, take off big corporate logos from their slides and use more images supported by minimal text. It is an important message and I forgive Garr for repeating it many, amny times throughout his book.

The other 50% is focussed around taking the designer approach to presentations. I enjoyed reading backgrounds on Japanese and Zen culture and how they can be applied to good design. I did learn a few things about photo composition.

The book is nicely illustrated with example presentations, and many "before and after" slide transformations.

Having read slide:ology by Nancy Duarte just a few days a go, it is interesting to draw a parallel. Slide:ology contains more practical presentation advice: how to define color schemes, specific examples about slide build up. Presentation Zen adds more on the create design process, esthetics, and photo composition.

I ditto what all have said. Garr Reynolds created what should be thought of as a Bible for Presentations. One area that has not been addressed in these reviews is the utility of this book for professional (i.e., medical, scientific) presentations. I find that using Reynold's basic tenets for the Introduction and Conclusion of a presentation, and inserting the hard data in the middle creates a novel and arresting change to the typical "Death-by-Powerpoint" scientific presentations. His ideas regarding appropriate ways to present data are eye-opening. I urge professionals to take a walk "outside of the box" and slowly introduce his ideas into your presentations--the improvements will be palpable!