Pitching and Presenting

Body language and Eye contact – need to make eye contact with everyone in the room

Consider space and seating arrangement

Stick to your time limit – disrespectful to next speaker if you run over time.

How do you combat this – practise beforehand

Use images over text – images help keep the audience’s attention whilst still being able to listen to you

Use plain English – more knowledgeable language can be more difficult for your audience to understand.

Why use slides?

Always gives audience something to look at, good structure

Software package doesn’t matter, PDF format works as well

Some warnings

Use 1 typeface

No crazy fonts

Use subtle transitions

Short videos/GIFS – can become awkward when your conscious of time, can lose engagement as much as create engagement

Too much text takes attention away from the talk

Use bullet points for text – 3 or 4 max 7

Don’t use hundreds of slides

Make sure you don’t leave a slide, so you never forget about a ‘in construction’ slide on the day

Check spelling and content

Slide setup 16:9 ratio (1920×1080) or (1280×720)

Use a grid to layout images – all some size, basic alignment.

Templates – useful but you are a designer and should start designing your slides

Note – can adapt a template

Content – what do you need to present?

Approach 1 – layout what you intend to cover

Approach 2 – just get to the point

Note – if you are going to handout supporting materials, best to handout at the end, can be distracting if given out beforehand

Rhetoric

• Repetition
• Rhetorical questions
• Metaphor
• Alliterations
• Humour
• Personal anecdotes

Being prepared

• Cables
• Connectors
• Clickers
• PDF backup
• Even water in case you choke up

Investor Pitch

• Vision
• Problem
• Solution
• Market – who’s going to use the product
• Team
• The ask – ask for something, you’re trying to win them over

Practise makes perfect

Keep it interesting – maybe don’t recap as an end slide, use an image or a quote – positive energy

 

Summary/Reflection

I find I struggle with presentations so I found this lecture to be helpful, even with some things being common sense I found it still to be good reminders as it’s easy to forget the small things when flustered. Moving forward I will take all notes into consideration when preparing my presentation.