Several months ago SlideShare launched a presentation contest. The goal was to find the World’s Best Presentation. The presentations were judged by top presentation gurus and the viewers (us, you and me).

The judges and top presentation gurus were Guy Kawasaki, Bert Decker, Garr Reynolds and Jerry Weissman.

Now I’ve created my share of presentations and I’ve been really proud of most of them… but these WAUW! Looking through the contributions you will quickly notice that they have a lot in common.

I recently created a slide show inspired by these presentations and the feedback was very positive. The audience told me they felt “provoked” to listen to me talk, instead of reading page after page of bullets.

1. Most use very large font sizes
2. Lots of colour contrast – most have a dark background with light text
3. Each presentation tell a story
4. Graphic images are big and simple – generally just one per slide
5. Images help tell the story – often critical to understanding the text
6. Text is minimal – many of the presentations only have a few words per slide
7. Text isn’t in the same place on every slide
8. Headlines aren’t used very much – Regular sentences or “Down style” are more common
9. Text and images are static, they don’t scoot around on the page
10. Slides don’t need audio to be understood (I might have some difficulties at that, people need a reason to listen to you)

Some of my presentations are way too text-heavy and according to these 10 observations way too boring and I might not get the right message out. Now all I need to learn is how to create the beautiful and fancy graphic in Photoshop (and be creative *ahem*). You can check out the winning presentations on SlideShare’s page. Amazing what you can do with PowerPoint.

[slideshare id=33834&doc=shift-happens-23665&w=425]