Trend Toward Powerful Images, Away From "Death by PowerPoint"

Slideshare recently announced the winners of their World's Best Presentation Contest '08. In third place was this troubling and informative presentation on Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe in Crisis

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: refugee hyperinflation)

While PowerPoint has been loved and despised almost since its start, there is a trend to reinvent the look of presentations, often harnessing the techniques of photojournalism and advertising.

A guru of this movement is Garr Reynolds, author of blog and book Presentation Zen. One of the techniques he recommends is looking at billboards and imagining standing in front of them as presentation slides.

One of the best visual arguments Reynolds makes for slides with fewer and bigger words and powerful images in his talk for authors @ Google, is an image of Al Gore in front of a typical presentation with a clip art globe and tons of bulleted facts about global warming compared with an actual image from An Inconvenient Truth.