March 24, 2006

Go Big or Go Home...in PowerPoint

Presentation Zen alerts us to a new meme in the Japan presentation world; this new "Takahashi Method". Essentially, Takahashi-san uses just text (albeit kanji characters that can say so much more than our lame 26 letter alphabet--a pictogram is worth a thousand words sometime). But not just any text, BIG text--like one kanji character fills up the whole screen.

Image of PowerPoint slide with huge sans serif kanji

Image of PowerPoint slide with huge sans serif words

Source: Maki's Ruby blog in Japan

I don't think this is new at all. Back at Scient, our head marketing guy, the irrepressible Chris Lochhead, would throw up slides like this one:

Image of PowerPoint slide with bold color background and huge sans serif word Ginormous

[Ginormous: Giant + Enormous. Part of Scient speak, like the aforementioned "Go Big or Go Home" phrase]

Classic Scient slide "deck": big bold saturated colors, Tahoma font, word that one of your fellow "colleagues" made up on the flight from SFO to ORD.

[Now people just leave out their vowels, like "Flickr" and "Esthr Dyson" You know, this isn't "Wheel of Fortune." Go buy a frigging vowel!]

Lochhead could pull this shit off because he had mojo in spades--flash, dash, confidence, and a terrific IPO behind him. This Takahashi guy seems like the anti-Lochhead though; an engineer who just wanted to get his point across better, and refactored his presentation method to suit.

Or maybe Lochhead was on to something back in those Web 1.0 days?

Posted by jameshom at March 24, 2006 03:55 PM | TrackBack
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