Page to Stage (part 3): working on presentation
Hi! My name is Oleksandr Leushchenko. I’m a senior staff engineer at Tide and GDE in Flutter and Dart. Since 2012 I have been speaking at small local meetups and big international conferences. Several companies invited me to host workshops for their employees and share my experience about where I’m looking for speaking topics, how I prepare my presentations, what I’m doing on stage, etc. This series of articles is the summary of what I’m talking about in such workshops:
- Where are topics hiding?
- Preparing a topic.
- Working on presentation.
- The speech.
There is no universal advice or unequivocally correct method for preparation. In this part, I’ll share my experience and describe what works for me.
List of topics 📝
I keep a list of potential presentation topics with abstracts. This exactly abstract I use when I submit the topic to the conference committee. Preparing for a presentation takes a lot of time, so I don’t work on a topic until I’m sure it’s worth it. The checklist from the first part of this series will come in handy here. I consider the metric “that’s interesting!” particularly important — the more people said this phrase to me, the more chances the presentation will be interesting for a broad audience. I usually spend no more than 30 minutes writing an abstract.
It is useful to review the list of topics regularly. Maybe you once added a topic you no longer care about — delete it. If it turns out it is still worthy of attention, it will definitely return to you.
At this stage, my working tool is Notion.
Mind Map 🗺
I try not to work on the presentation for as long as possible because it will have many distracting details (presentation style, pictures, fonts, animations, etc.) that I’d want to care about. Because of this, I always start with a mind map.
This is what a typical Mind Map for a presentation looks like:
It’s easy to see that this is the pyramid from the previous part that has been turned 90 degrees! It is the frame of the presentation.
When creating a mind map, I constantly return to the practices described in the second part and check whether my thoughts have not “floated”, my statements are still connected, and I am not speaking about everything at once.
I spend from 2–3 days to 2–3 weeks on a single mind map. During the day, I open my upcoming presentation, think about new questions that I can potentially get from the audience, and most importantly (and most difficult) — I look for facts that will substantiate my statements. Everything starts with an idea, but it also happens that the idea of the presentation is transformed due to some interesting facts that I was lucky to find during preparations. Several times I had given up on a topic when I realized that I lacked facts to prove my point while working on a mind map.
It is important to read the map aloud periodically. Sometimes what sounds logical and consistent in your head ceases to be so as soon as you say it aloud. The Rubber Duck not only assists in code writing but helps with presentations quite well.
My tool at this stage is the SimpleMind mobile app, but any mind map app (MindMeister, Miro, MindNote, Coggle, etc.) will do, as they’re all more or less the same. I use a mobile app because I return to the map several times a day, often on the road.
Code 👨💻
If you’re going to do a technical talk, there’s a good chance it will contain code. To know where to copy-paste this code from later, and in order to make sure of the validity of this code, I always create a working prototype of what I will talk about.
I usually spend 1–2 evenings on this.
The tool of this stage is the IDE.
Slides 📽
When I can give a talk using a mind map as a presentation plan, an IDE for demo code, and maybe a whiteboard for notes, then I’m considering whether I need slides! Several times I gave a presentation right from the IDE. For some presentations, I only needed a whiteboard. That was even more interactive and fun! The presentation is the least important element of your talk. You don’t want people to focus on slides constantly. Otherwise, why are you there? A presentation that does not need a speaker is not a presentation. Remember TED talks? How many speakers put the presentation first? And how many did without slides at all?
If you still need a presentation, you can sketch it out quickly because you already have the structure of the presentation ready — it’s your mind map. Just drag it onto the slides and add some text and pictures where needed. Remember that less is more.
If you decide to make slides, the main tip is: don’t make the audience choose where to look. You are in charge of the audience’s attention. Want to show something on a slide? Show it and be silent for a moment. This will allow the audience to switch to the slide. Then take their attention back to you.
The audience should always know where to look, and most of the time, you should be the focus of their attention.
This is where the recommendation regarding animations comes from. Never leave an animation on a slide. It will distract and mesmerize the audience. Rest assured, half of the listeners will stop listening to what you have to say and will be completely hypnotized by the animation. However, animations can be useful when you move from one slide to another if you need to show how objects on one slide are related to objects on another. If you doubt whether an animation is necessary — don’t use it.
My advice regarding the choice of colors is to make dark text on a light background. It always works well. If you know that slides will be shown on the TV, and not on the projector, you can think about a black background and white text. A different background can be used on individual slides to indicate that you have moved to the next chapter.
Grab a standard template from Keynote, Google Slides, or PowerPoint and use just that. Your slides should complement your talk, not be the centerpiece of it. They are not as important as they seem!
I usually spend 2–3 evenings on a presentation, and I never work on a presentation in advance.
My main tools are Canva, Unsplash, Keynote, and Google Slides.
Slides are the simplest and least important part of the preparation. I advise you to start submitting a topic when you are comfortable with its mind map. How and where to submit talks? And how to give a talk? We will talk about this in the next chapter.
Russia started an unfair and cruel war against my country. If you found this article interesting or useful, please, donate to Ukraine’s Armed Forces. I can recommend my friends volunteers — the “Yellow Tape”, you can be 100% sure that the money will support our victory. Thanks in advance to everyone who participated.
Glory to Ukraine! 🇺🇦
