Presentation Visuals

I hate PowerPoint. Please forgive my bluntness. No aspersions to our neighbors at Microsoft intended, but, I have to say that the worst thing that ever happened to presentations in the A/E/C industry was the advent of PowerPoint. I have seen many PowerPoint Presentations that constrain creativity, make content boring, and serve only as a crutch that diminishes the quality of a team’s short-list interview. Oftentimes the biggest challenge I have as a coach is convincing a team that they are better than the technology they’ve chosen to communicate their message.

In many cases, the best thing that can happen to the presentation is to have a hard drive malfunction right before they go live. The best presentations I’ve seen in the last 18 months, have been executed seamlessly without the use of PowerPoint.  These teams used beautiful banners, life sized time-lines, and interactive 3D models.  They turned on the lights and looked audience members right in the eyes. They talked right to selectors, not at moving bullets or even beautiful images. The speakers on these teams said something meaningful about the project and they illustrated their points with low tech, but high impact visual aids. They proved the point that illustrating your points is not the same as simply typing your notes into Power Point.

PowerPoint was never intended to make words fly – that’s an unfortunate feature that has been misused by everyone since the program’s creation. In fact, anyone over the age of 13 who uses such distracting PowerPoint transitions as “flying”, “boxing”, or “wiping” should have his/her license to use the MS Office suite permanently revoked.  That said, used correctly, PowerPoint is actually an amazing tool useful to animate a site plan, make an image big enough for people to see or to show a phased site build-out. None of these involve flying, bouncing, or fading words.

While the impact of PowerPoint on your budget may appear small, consider how long it takes for your team to create endless slides while it draws their focus away from creating compelling content. Consider also that the use of PowerPoint no longer differentiates a presentation. And, a bad PowerPoint is worse than using no visuals at all.

If you want to distinguish your presentation in this industry, take a risk. Use images rather than words and more often than not, step away from the visual crutch to look selectors in the eye and really talk to them about their project. That’s what wins. 

There’s no award given in the industry for PowerPoint prowess. As far as I know, the AIA has no special award for Most Beautiful PowerPoint Presentation. But, I’ll bet each of us could personally give an award for the Worst PowerPoint of the Year. It is certainly odd that the best of them isn’t memorable but, that the worst stay with us forever.