Hi, I’m Matt Balara.I solve design problems with my head.

If you attend two geek conferences back to back, you get to see alot of slide decks. And while the decks at SXSW and the IA Summit were chock full of good content, many of them had a few little practical problems, which would’ve all been easy to avoid. I’ve done plenty of pitch presentations, so I was thinking, “if I was presenting, I would wish I’d thought of that!” the whole time.

Here are ten practical tips for giving good deck, aimed at geek conferences, but hopefully useful for others as well.

1. Make sure that your Twitter handle is big and clear on the first slide. If you say smart things, people will want to follow you, and the backchannel will want to use the shortest name they can find for you.
2. Likewise, don’t forget a hash tag for your session, and keep it short. #gp is better than #greatpresentation, for example. Eating as few of the backchannel’s 140 characters as possible is good for your karma.
3. If you’re on a panel, tell the audience to ask questions through Twitter. It can be a nice way of answering what you want when you want, and dodging the long, drawn out, “I have something to prove” questions that everybody hates.
4. Use LARGE typography. From the back of a big room, type smaller than 64 px is going to be hard to impossible to read.
5. We’ve all got laptops with us. If we want to read, we’ll use them. Keep your slides visually interesting, but go light on the text. The best presenters use the least text in their slides.
6. Do not put slide-junk like the date, the name of the conference and your logo on every slide. We all know where we are, who you are and what day it is, and we’re having a hard enough time concentrating on your incisive insight without unnecessary distractions.
7. Anything you really want people to see should be in the top two thirds of any slide. People’s heads will invariably block the bottom third.
8. You never know how well set up the projector and screen will be, so keep away from the edges of your slides to make sure nothing gets cut off. As a general rule, keep a 10% zone on top, bottom and both sides free of content.
9. Make sure your type/background combo is high contrast. If you present in a well-lit room, grey on black will be hard to read. Highest contrast, but boring, is black on white. White - or any bright colour - on black works too, and generally looks fancier.
10. Unless you’re presenting some massively complex essay, present your material, don’t read it. If you’re reading your presentation, you seem stiff and you can’t connect to the audience. Even if you flub a line or two, you’ll always get more sympathy if you present without reading. Reading is a refuge for nervous presenters, but one you should work on getting over as soon as you can.

These tips won’t make you a great presenter, but they will ensure that your great presentation can be seen, looks good, and encourages backchannel discussion. Hope it helps!

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A smart use of Twitter: I’m at the Information Architecture Summit, being held this year in the beautiful Peabody Hotel in Memphis. As usual at such geek gatherings, there’s a healthy backchannel running on twitter under the hash tag #ias09. The hotel is following the stream, and answering our questions, such as: Who serves good bbq? Where can we get a real espresso? They’re even using twitter to greet guests, and deal with complaints about rooms at the hotel. And, of course, they throw in a little marketing for their famous ducks. Event venues take note!

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This was originally published last June on Stowe Boyd’s blog /message, reproduced here with Stowe’s permission due to my odd feeling of wanting to have all my stuff in one place.

This afternoon my best friend Steffen called me. The first thing I said was, “Hey! What have you been up to the past couple of weeks?” As be began to tell me, it surprised me how strange it felt having to ask him that question.

If the laws of chance should flip on their heads, and I would bump into Jeffrey Zeldman on the street tomorrow, I’d ask him, “How’s your dog doing?” If Jason Santa Maria were with him I’d say, “Dude, killer relaunch. ” Derek Powazek’s in town? “Damn, I’d love to get some of that heat over here.”

These three are all web celebrities - let’s call them blebrities - but I’ve never met a single one of them. I follow them on Twitter, so every day I have the feeling of looking through a pinhole at their lives, even though they wouldn’t know me from a hole in the wall. We’re continually in touch (even if it’s one-way) and they therefore have a kind of daily presence in my life. We all know how this works, so I won’t waste any more time on it.

But what’s this do for my meatspace friends? Steffen (the poor bastard) is part of the “don’t get it” crowd and isn’t on Twitter, or anything else online that we call social. He writes emails (rarely) and calls me occasionally. Although he’s one of my favourite people in the world, and we have a great time together when we see each other once a month, I know less about what’s he’s doing every day than I know about any number of people I’ve never met who’re sitting on the other side of the world.

And sadly, although my emotional impulse is to avoid this reaction, I have to admit that Steffen’s becoming less relevant in my life. I miss him.

Typically, someone who doesn’t “get” Twitter, would stare at me in shocked horror if I told them this, but the fact is, Twitter and other online social tools have made it possible for me to have a kind of light, continuous contact with so many people, and this contact has become an essential part of my life. If those people are meatspace friends, it intensifies the relationship and saves us both time. Instead of asking them, “what have you been up to?” when we see each other I can say, “I don’t really like it either,” and without explanation we both know what we’re talking about. Meatspace friends who aren’t online are a conspicuous absence.

In a way that I myself find completely unfair and strange, I’m starting to resent Steffen’s non-participation, as in, “dude, why aren’t you talking to me?” As Jyri Engstrom said in an interview with the BBC,

Being-hyper connected will become a precondition for citizenship.

In the same way mobiles are a necessity, in five years time being hyper-connected will become a necessity to be an active participant in the social world.

Sure, there are still some curmudgeons who still refuse to own a mobile phone, but they’re seen as stubborn outsiders. I’m looking forward to the certain future when hyperconnectivity is the norm, and I can help, soothe, laugh at and commiserate with all of my friends, whenever and wherever we are.

Even Steffen.

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Nearing the end of the first day of reboot, I realised that I’ve learned from last year’s reboot that it’s stressful and hectic to try and blog during the conference.

I’ve been doing video interviews, asking people the question, “What’s design to you?” The answers have been many, varied and intelligent so far. They’ll go up here on the blog and on my vimeo page as I get them cut and ready for prime-time.

I’ll post a summary of reboot 10 afterwards, but if you’re interested in how it’s going, your best bet is to follow the very active back-channel on Summize.

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Stowe Boyd responded to a typical re-hash of the “connectedness = overload = falling productivity” argument against social media, but to be honest, the argument (yawn) wasn’t nearly as interesting as Stowe’s response. It’s a lovely visionary rant about a future most people can’t even imagine, from a guy who sounds like he’s been there. This is what he calls Boyd’s Law:

Connected people will naturally gravitate toward an ethic where they will trade personal productivity for connectedness: they will interrupt their own work to help a contact make progress. Ultimately, in a bottom-up fashion, this leads to the network as a whole making more progress than if each individual tries to optimize personal productivity.

At the the risk of sounding like some sort of Boyd fanboi, this is the stuff that flashed my ass off last year at Reboot.

The willingness to swap personal productivity for connection is just that: it is an ethical choice that asserts that the bonds of connection, today and over time, are more important — not just abstractly, but in the most concrete way — than making headway on this piece of work, right now.

As someone who’s got more friends who’ve never heard of Twitter than have, it all sounds pretty damned far out to part of me. But there’s also a part that has begun feeling incomplete without an hourly dip into the stream of contact that today’s net makes possible, and that part can see Stowe’s future from here, and is eager for everyone else to get on with it and get connected.

I have said for years that the centroids — media, religion, government, and corporations — would war against connectedness and the flow consciousness that is needed to operate in the new social Web. It is inherently subversive, because at its core flow is about remaining connected to those that matter to you over the more formal and official relationships that individuals are supposed to have with organizations.

I’d agree, but so far in my experience the biggest hindrance to a more connected world are the people themselves, and not the media, church or whatever. For example, I’ve been evangelising Twitter quite a bit lately, and the first reaction of most people is a pitying look—“Matt, my soft-brained friend… I hope he’s not dangerous…” Of the very few who actually give it a try (possibly only to pacify me), almost all come back to me after a day and say, “I don’t get it. What’s the big deal?” When I try and show them, and see that they’re only following one person—me—I try and explain it’s about connectedness or as Leisa Reichelt calls it ambient intimacy, and that you can’t be very connected with only one contact, and, and… and then I often run out of steam and mumble something like, “you’ll get it if you do it long enough…”

The reason I know Stowe’s onto something, no matter how far-fetched and techno-hippie it sounds, is I’ve seen this kind of transformation happen. Firstly to myself (I didn’t get it to begin with either), and occasionally to someone I’ve browbeaten into trying Twitter for more than a day. The transformative power of social media is made clear by the aversion most feel to it at first—it’s foreign, unimaginable, and therefore threatening—and the “I get it!” moment most experience at some point after giving it a try. If it was just another fad, just something to play with and forget, everybody would try it without resistance and nobody would care longer than a couple of weeks. But for most, it’s becoming an essential part of everyday communication, and it’s changed who they are. And who we’re becoming is more connected, more aware and faster thinking people, through the influence and support of our networks. And that’s such an optimistic vision—such a rare optimistic vision of the future—that I can’t help but grin to be a part of it, and can’t help but thank Stowe for pointing it out to me.

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Although Noam Cohen doesn’t seem to understand how Tumblr and Twitter differ, he’s written an interesting article for the New York Times about the social effects of being constantly, but lightly, in touch with hundreds. And he quotes all—round smart Aussie lady and Twitter friend Leisa Reichelt.

For those of you who’ve learned to love Quicksilver (and if you haven’t you should. It’s worth it.), and are driven to tell everyone what you’re doing as you’re doing it, check out Tweet, a twitter plugin for Quicksilver. Installation’s a little more complicated than for most Quicksilver plugins, but it works great. Vomiting out unconsidered and uninteresting news about yourself has never been faster.

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