Ray Anthony

Sooner or later in your professional life, you’ll have to give a really important presentation. By focusing on several distinct and unique aspects of creating a presentation (topic selection, audience analysis, visual design, and delivery technology and techniques), you can develop the skills to give innovative, stimulating presentations with consistently positive results.

At some point, everyone has had to sit through boring, pedestrian presentations. You can't expect to have a meaningful impact on your audience if you subject them to a run-of-the-mill presentation. So how do you go about reimagining, reinventing, and remaking your presentations? The following figure outlines the four basic steps.

When putting together a presentation, there are a bazillion apps that can help you create cool content. The ten apps we list here let you sketch, make graphs, edit photos and video, and add special effects. For the most part, you create the content and then either save it as a PDF or import it directly into your presentation app (PowerPoint, Keynote, or whatever you use).

Video can enhance your presentation and grab the audience’s attention with a new element. Edit your video in a video editing app such as iMovie or Adobe After Effects before adding it to your presentation. For best results, save your file in HD 720p or full HD 1080p as a .m4a or .mp4 file, and if you’re using audio, embed AAC audio files.

Always set aside enough time to fully plan your presentations. Here is a list of valuable questions for you (and especially your presentation team) to consider that will greatly assist you in developing ideas, tactics, and approaches in your innovative presentation: What niche image (besides a competent and professional image) do I want to project to this audience to build my credibility?

For more than a decade, researchers in the academic field of communications studies have looked at how people learn and tried to identify the best way to relate complex information, especially of a scientific or engineering nature. Dr. Michael Alley, a professor at Pennsylvania State Univerisity and author of The Craft of Scientific Presentations, developed a presentation style called the Assertion-Evidence Structure or AES.

In today's polyglot world, a time may come when you're asked to give a presentation to an audience for whom English is not their first language or to give a presentation in a language that isn't your first, but that you know. Either situation can be cause for anxiety, so keep the following in mind when preparing yourself and your presentation for these types of events: Be aware of gestures that may be acceptable in North America but unacceptable elsewhere.

Rate of speech is how fast you talk in words per minute (wpm) and is an important component of innovative presentations. Rate of speech is also called speed, pace, tempo, and rhythm. The typical or average speech rate is about 125 wpm, and most people recommend that you speak between 110 to 180 wpm, although not consistently.

Do you trust someone who talks to you but doesn’t look you in the eye? Think about how your audience for your innovative presentation feels. Does a lack of eye contact make them feel uncomfortable? If you don’t engage them with eye contact, it not only takes away the personal touch and hurts rapport, but people in your audience will form a negative impression of you — that you’re nervous, feel uncomfortable with your topic, are hiding something, or are afraid of the reaction to your talk.