Designers

Nancy Duarte

Your presentations are the best opportunity to tell your story and inspire people to act. Since 1988, Nancy Duarte has built a business on the art and science of creating great presentations.

Stephen Bau

Feb 21, 2019 • 4 min read

Nancy Duarte has built a business on building presentations, in part based on her influential work with Al Gore on An Inconvenient Truth. She wrote a book about the art and science of creating great presentation slides: Slide:ology.

The Company

Since 1988, Duarte, Inc. has been focused on developing the presentations for leaders and brands. Their clients include almost half of the top 50 brands, notable experts, respected causes, and global consulting firms.

Duarte: About

Nancy’s Bio

Nancy Duarte is a best-selling author with thirty years of CEO-ing under her belt. She’s driven her firm, Duarte, Inc., to be the global leader behind some of the most influential messages and visuals in business and culture. Duarte, Inc., is the largest design firm in Silicon Valley, as well as one of the top woman-owned businesses in the area. Nancy has written six best-selling books, four have won awards.

Structure Your Presentation Like a Story

After studying hundreds of speeches, I’ve found that the most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved.

That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently — to move from what is to what could be. And by following Aristotle’s three-part story structure (beginning, middle, end), they create a message that’s easy to digest, remember, and retell.

Structure Your Presentation Like a Story

Slide:ology

The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations

Isolate the most crucial information on your slide and express it visually
Clean up cluttered and confusing slides

Slide:ology will teach you how to think like a designer. Learn tricks that will let you isolate the most crucial information on your slide and express it visually.

Create Slides People Will Remember

Use slides selectively
Write the slides after you’ve prepared the speech
Design slides people can “get” in 3 seconds
Storyboard one concept per slide
Remember that slides are a visual medium

Create Slides People Will Remember

Visual Storytelling

Nancy Duarte explains how to create better visual presentations so you can communicate your ideas with efficiency, clarity and impact. She is CEO of Silicon Valley’s largest design firm Duarte, and the author of three books on the art and science of visual storytelling. Duarte appeared at the Stanford Graduate School of Business as a guest speaker for professor Jennifer Aaker’s class “The Power of Story in Business” on January 10, 2013.

Nancy Duarte: How to Create Better Visual Presentations

5 Rules for Creating Great Presentations

Treat your audience as king
Spread ideas & move people
Help them see what you’re saying
Practice design, not decoration
Cultivate healthy relationships with your slides—and your audience

To improve the visual design, pay particular attention to the last two points. Here, these two points are reframed as “Focus” and “Simplify”.

Focus

Nancy rightly points out that 90% of the creative process is actually destructive. You create a slide—and then slowly but surely see what you can peel away.

Do you have one main point? Consider using just a single word on a slide to convey your core message. Want your audience to remember several ideas? Don’t plop them all bullet-style on a single slide; reveal them one at a time, creating story, and share an example or anecdote to illustrate each one. Have an image or quote that accurately expresses your idea? Let it! Don’t be afraid to remove everything else from the slide, and let that one powerful image say it all.

Simplify

Too many of us “hide” behind our slides. We overload them with text and complicated diagrams, hoping they’ll reduce the communication burden—when actually they increase it. Reduce the amount of text on your slides as much as possible. Put all of the details in your notes, and practice like crazy! Get in the habit of using slides only as ‘digital scenery’ and connecting eye to eye with your audience. Remember: the Audience is King.

5 Rules for Creating Great Presentations from @NancyDuarte

The Glance Test

Since people can’t multitask, that means that audiences cannot simultaneously read your dense, bullet-riddled slides AND listen to you AND understand what you mean. Thus, your slide should function more like a billboard than any other media.

The audience should be able to quickly grasp the meaning of the slide before turning back to the presenter. And they should be able to do it in three seconds or less.

Designing Presentation Slides that Pass the Glance Test

Each slide should communicate a single idea
Speak to your audiences’ needs, concerns, and fears
Design simple slides with a consistent visual style
Arrange and layout your slides with care

These tips are gleaned from resources from the Duarte blog:

Nancy’s TEDx Talk

Presentations that have a 3-act story structure, and they place the audience at the center as the hero, regularly change minds, spread ideas, and even start movements.

The secret structure of great talks

Hick’s Law

Always remember Hick’s Law to keep things simple. Don’t overwhelm people with too much information.

Hick’s Law: Making the choice easier for users