Garr Reynolds > Quotes

“Getting the little things right is what sets professionals apart from amateurs.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations

“Humans are completely incapable of reading and comprehending text on a screen and listening to a speaker at the same time. Therefore, lots of text (almost any text!), and long, complete sentences are bad, Bad, BAD.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations

“We don’t begin every new sentence in a conversation by restating our names, so why would you bombard people with your company logo on every slide?”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“The one thing that all successful people have in common is persistence,”
― Garr Reynolds, Naked Presenter, The: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides

“Stories get our attention and are easier to remember than lists of rules.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“Pablo Picasso said that “all children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“People are only capable of absorbing a very small amount of material at a time. Therefore, it is counterproductive to throw up a slide with lots of text or complicated diagrams. Each change on the screen should relate to one simple new thought that should be expanded and explained by the presenter.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations

“If you need to put eight-point or ten-point fonts up there, it’s because you do not know your material. If you start reading your material because you do not know your material, the audience is very quickly going to think that you are a bozo. They are going to say to themselves ‘This bozo is reading his slides. I can read faster than this bozo can speak. I will just read ahead.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“This is an age in which those who “think different” will be valued even more than ever.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“Making mistakes is not the same thing as being creative, but if you are not willing to make mistakes, then it is impossible to be truly creative.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“Design isn’t just about iPods and cool products; it’s about improving people’s lives and making things clear and accessible. Design, at its most fundamental level, is about finding solutions.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations

“After that, it’s often too late for your bullet points to do you much good. You can wreck a communication process with lousy logic or unsupported facts, but you can’t complete it without emotion. Logic is not enough. Communication is the transfer of emotion.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“Symphony is about applying our whole mind—logic, analysis, synthesis, intuition—to make sense of our world (that is, our topic), find the big picture, and determine what is important and what is not before the day of a talk.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“Laughing people are more creative people. They are more productive people.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“No more than six words on a slide.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“Only through mistakes can you see where you’re lacking, where you need to work.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“When you look at your slide, notice where your eye is drawn first, second, and so on. What path does your eye take?”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“Design is about making communication as easy and clear for the viewer as possible.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“The biggest element a story has, then, is conflict. Conflict is dramatic. At its core, story is about a conflict between our expectations and cold reality.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
― Garr Reynolds, Naked Presenter, The: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides

“it is more difficult to process information if it is coming at us both verbally and in written form at the same time.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“3. Consider fully, act decisively.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“Make the audience aware that they have a gap in their knowledge and then fill that gap with the answers to the puzzle (or guide them to the answers).”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“You learn the basics because they make your work easier and your designs better. — John McWade, designer and author”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations

“does your computer function as a “bicycle for your mind,” amplifying your own capabilities and ideas? Or is it more like a “car for your mind” with prepackaged formulas that make your ideas soft?”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“Video can provide a welcome change of pace in a presentation. For longer presentations, it’s especially important to change up what you are doing. There is evidence that people’s attention really drops after about ten minutes. Unless you change some aspect of your presentation delivery from time to time, you are going to lose some of your audience. You cannot simply keep talking and dishing out new information. You must do something that is relevant to your topic—something that re-engages your audience or illustrates and supports your point in a different way. You can tell a story, give examples, explain a graph, show an illustration or photo, ask a question, and so on. And, of course, using video that relates to your point is also a great way to change pace and engage the viewer’s brain, bringing them deeper into your presentation.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations

“Still, as John Maeda points out in The Laws of Simplicity (MIT Press), “In the field of design there is the belief that with more constraints, better solutions are revealed.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“Many design tools in Keynote and PowerPoint are quite useful, but the 3D tool is one I could very well do without.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“but results are bad. This attempt to save time reminds me of a more fitting Japanese proverb: Nito o oumono wa itto mo ezu or “Chase two hares and get none.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

“4. Know when to stop.”
― Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery