First Place: Smoke – The Convenient Truth

created by Empowered Presentations from Hawaii using Apple Keynote

This presentation reminds me of the presentation that won a couple of years ago, titled “Shift Happens” .  It’s a format that works very well for presentation that are posted on websites and are self-presenting.  I particularly like the alternating black and white background, the clever choice of images to show statistics in a powerful way, and the clean large font.

Second Place: You Suck at PowerPoint

created by GlobalGossip from Canada

I agree with all the suggestions in this presentation but I would be very careful in choosing fonts that are not standard on most personal computers.  Though they make look nice, they may not travel well. Make sure you embed them in the presentation and check how they look on the target pc. If you are interested in more font ideas from presentation, take a look at this post from Pierre Morsa who shows 10 classic fonts for presentations.

Third Place: Social Media for Business

created by Presentation Advisors from the USA

Another excellent presentation, take a look at slide 30 to see an alternative way of designing a bullet list: no bullets and right alignment.

There were also winners by category, which you can see in this article.

Congratulations to all the winners!

You might like to take a look at winners from past years. Here are the links:

2007 SlideShare Contest Winners

2008 SlideShare Contest Winners

2009 SlideShare Contest Winners

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It is true they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but  “cut and paste” operations do not necessarily make a good slide.  I would like to share my opinion on the graphics and layout of one slide:

1. Images with a white background should not be pasted on a dark background, even more so if they are of different sizes. If the template background had been white, the border would not have been visible.  Keep this in mind when you need to paste images with white backgrounds: choose an appropriate template, or, even better,  make the pictures as large as the slide.
2. The clip-art on the first photograph could have been avoided and a real person photographed instead. Clip-art is out of fashion, especially when used with or near photographs.
3. The palm device in the other picture, displaying flowers and butterflies, does not give the idea of the real device used to carry out the survey. Why not use a real picture of the PDA or other computer used?
4. The background comes from an old PowerPoint template; this gives an amateur feel instead of a professional image to the presentation and the Expo 2015 project as a whole.

If you would like my comments on your slides, why not ask for a slide checkup?

I found them to be a collection of the slides presented by everyone, as is usually the case, giving me a chance to evaluate the styles used. From the looks of it, I think that the audience suffered “death by PowerPoint” once again while they heard these presentations.
The slides are very full of text, written with a very small font, and contain many long sentences, which I suppose the speaker read. Certainly, in these cases, it is easier for the presenter because he just reads and can prepare less, but the slides become “the speech” and the speaker becomes a simple “reader”. Do you know that the audience reads faster than the voice of the speaker? As a result, when the audience will have finished reading all the text on the slide on their own, it is possible that the speaker will only be at the beginning of the text. How boring to have to wait for the speaker to finish all the text! I hope that some of the speakers were more brilliant than their slides.

The presenter’s speech should hold up on its own (what if a technical problem made projection impossible, what would have happened?) and slides should only be a support medium to help the audience remember. Recent studies indicate that well-chosen images, used as background to a speech, help the public to remember, while masses of text, projected and read by the presenter, are usually forgotten in a very short time. But these were not the only defects I noted.

I was very surprised to see grammar and spelling errors. I think that presentation slides, even more when they contain a lot of text, must always be read and checked with a lot of care to avoid these mistakes. I suggest that after running the spellchecker built into the software, we make other people read our slides before presenting them or publishing them: another pair of eyes will see errors that we have missed, errors that would give a negative impression to the public, who will certainly find them.