While preparing for my recent talks, I watched videos of presentations given by Steve Jobs at Apple product launches. I first learned of Jobs' unique style, by the brilliantly informative analyses of his presentations at Presentation Zen, and learned a lot about presentation style by watching Jobs' presentations downloaded from the Apple site and reading Zen's analyses of them. I'd like to add my own observations the extensive analysis done at the Zen site.
An exercise that I found useful was to rewatch Jobs' presentations with the audio turned off. By eliminating what he was saying, I was able to pay complete attention to his use of the stage and, more importantly, his use of graphics. What I noted right away was not only the absence of bullet points, but for most of his talk the absence of any text at all on the screen. The majority of visuals that accompanied his presentation was graphics only. When, for example, he announced that for the first time Madonna's complete collection will be available online (on iTunes), all they showed was pcitures of her and her album covers. Not even a heading with her name at top of the screen. No text at all.
The primary times when he (well, his Marketing department) used text was for headline-worthy announcements. "70% Market Share!" "1 Billion Downloads!" By limiting the use of text to just these key moments, the words had that much greater an impact.
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