Ray Anthony

Sooner or later in your professional life, you’ll have to give a really important presentation. By focusing on several distinct and unique aspects of creating a presentation (topic selection, audience analysis, visual design, and delivery technology and techniques), you can develop the skills to give innovative, stimulating presentations with consistently positive results.

If you create your innovative presentations in PowerPoint on your computer but then want to show the presentation directly on your iPad or projected from it, or if you share your presentations with a staff of people, SlideShark is a good choice. The free version offers 50 MB (megabytes) of storage, which increases each time a friend you recommend signs up, or you can purchase a gigabyte of storage for $8 per month.

A category of displays to consider using for those speeches or innovative presentations that warrant them are items that you can buy or build or hire someone else to build. Here is an example of a display that adds flavor to a presentation. You can place something like this near you or somewhere in the room. Or you can have it as an attractive sign at an entrance beckoning people into a meeting room.

At some point, everyone has had to sit through boring, pedestrian presentations. You can't expect to have a meaningful impact on your audience if you subject them to a run-of-the-mill presentation. So how do you go about reimagining, reinventing, and remaking your presentations? The following figure outlines the four basic steps.

When putting together a presentation, there are a bazillion apps that can help you create cool content. The ten apps we list here let you sketch, make graphs, edit photos and video, and add special effects. For the most part, you create the content and then either save it as a PDF or import it directly into your presentation app (PowerPoint, Keynote, or whatever you use).

Video can enhance your presentation and grab the audience’s attention with a new element. Edit your video in a video editing app such as iMovie or Adobe After Effects before adding it to your presentation. For best results, save your file in HD 720p or full HD 1080p as a .m4a or .mp4 file, and if you’re using audio, embed AAC audio files.

Always set aside enough time to fully plan your presentations. Here is a list of valuable questions for you (and especially your presentation team) to consider that will greatly assist you in developing ideas, tactics, and approaches in your innovative presentation: What niche image (besides a competent and professional image) do I want to project to this audience to build my credibility?

For more than a decade, researchers in the academic field of communications studies have looked at how people learn and tried to identify the best way to relate complex information, especially of a scientific or engineering nature. Dr. Michael Alley, a professor at Pennsylvania State Univerisity and author of The Craft of Scientific Presentations, developed a presentation style called the Assertion-Evidence Structure or AES.

In today's polyglot world, a time may come when you're asked to give a presentation to an audience for whom English is not their first language or to give a presentation in a language that isn't your first, but that you know. Either situation can be cause for anxiety, so keep the following in mind when preparing yourself and your presentation for these types of events: Be aware of gestures that may be acceptable in North America but unacceptable elsewhere.