The Prezi Menu

PowerPoint slide shows are like commercial jet aircraft– ubiquitous in business life, but with technology that hasn’t seemed to budge in decades.   As a communication medium, PowerPoint is one of the great corrupting influences for those of us who trade in the office arts.  It’s the junky sit-com of authoring environments, with it’s crammed toolbars full of lazy visualizations and transitions, text distorters, prix fixe layouts and color schemes, royalty free clip-art hokum and assorted other information-free nonsense.   Its worst trait of all is more fundamental – that it constrains our ideas to the slide as the uniformly sized chunk of information.  Once we commit to dealing in slides, we take an immediate hit on our mental agility and the level of focus we bring to the simple act of conveying our ideas.

What’s the problem with slides, anyways?  Well, there’s two main ones:

• Problem one:  blank slides beg to be filled.  Our natural sense of pacing is compromised by a feeling that we need to have a roughly equal amount of information on each slide – not too much, not too little.
• Problem two:  slides can only be strung together with one-way linearity, each slide presented without the context of the larger organization.   I’ve long struggled with this problem of maintaining context in a PowerPoint deck – particularly when I’m working on a long, multi-concept behemoth with lots of nested ideas that are trying to build to some sort of impactful conclusion.

But here’s the thing.  Everyone’s life is plagued by sucky PowerPoint presentations yet it’s not clear at all what will replace them.   If you’re an Apple user, you can tap into a slightly more rarefied set of look-and-feel choices by using Keynote, but with essentially the same end result.  If you’ve got the time and resources, you can work in the media of video or custom Flash animations – but if this were to go mainstream enough to threaten PowerPoint it would have happened by now.

The Prezi User Tutorial is a Prezi Itself

Enter Prezi, the innovative “zooming” presentation editor that is making a serious bid to change the very concept of business presentation by taking the slide out of the equation altogether.  In Prezi, you start by creating a large macro-design, such as a map, then zoom in to add detail to your creations.  Born in Hungary by a youthful tech start-up, Prezi is masterfully designed with an interface that is breathtakingly unfamiliar yet strangely learn-as-you-go.  Indeed, the design is so unusual, that you can bet it would have never seen the light of day at a company with even the smallest degree of risk aversion (even you, Apple).   Gimmicky it may feel, but Prezi’s zooming capability solves a key cognitive problem of PowerPoint – maintaining context – primarily through the Tuftean concept of micro-macro views.  It also easily affords nonlinear authoring of ideas with the option to add the linear presentation “path” later.  This is a liberating way of working.

I’ll take the suspense out of this review right now by saying I’m a huge fan of Prezi, but I’m still trying to find a role for it in my working life.   It is not likely to replace PowerPoint for me, for the simple reason that vertigo-inducing zooms and pans during an in-person presentation are exactly the kind of distractions that I strive to avoid when I speak.  My preferred in-person presentations (that I have either seen or given myself) are straight series of slides that are made up entirely of images.  The first priority should be to concentrate on what the speaker is saying, with background imagery used to illustrate points and for entertainment value.   But Prezi’s true brilliance is in the authoring environment.  With its limited but carefully chosen and artful tools, it inspires creativity but makes it nearly impossible to create anything aesthetically vulgar.  The freedom of working on a single canvas in three dimensions (I’ll count zooming in as a third dimension here) is amazing.  And what’s annoying when projected on the large screen (as during an in-person presentation) is quite engaging on the small screen.  Note that Prezi automatically outputs to Flash and the files can be easily embedded in a website.   So I’m more likely to use this as an alternative to Flash for authoring simple animations intended for the blogs and websites I work on than I am as an alternate to Powerpoint for in-person presentations.

Related Resources

Prezi for Dummies