Presentation: Pseudo Analog in digital slideware

If the title got your attention, let me now explain what I meant.

Our CEO is a phenomenally great presenter, and sometimes we just go out of our way to attend his talks only to hear him speak. I recently attended one of his talks at the company meeting. He used a new technique this time. And wow, did it have an impact or what?

He had used beautiful large images as usual. He had picked a nice theme. He had equated the state of our company to be like a construction site and in constant progress, and hence he had fantastic images of construction sites and heavy machinery. And on these slides with the huge images, he had no bullet points. No fancy fonts. Most of his text was a scrawl using a nice flouroscent marker colour (or perhaps he used a fantastic handwriting font).

This blend of a seemingly analog technique (writing by hand) and a digital medium had a pretty good effect. This is not new, if you think about it. In the age of transparencies (not sure how many of the younger readers have even seen a transparency sheet), we used to print out material onto the transparency slide and if we wanted to build up a case, we would use a transparency marker and write on the slide. This gives a feeling of  engagement and involvement of the presenter.

I thought it was a pretty nifty idea, that I would share here in the blog.