Prezi Presentations Pop!

If you regularly give presentations, you might want to look at a program called Prezi and take the impact of your presentations up a notch or two. Like PowerPoint, Prezi is based on using slide views of information made more dramatic through applying animations. However, Prezi animations go far beyond what PowerPoint is capable of and yield an experience for the audience that is far more engaging and interesting.

Unlike PowerPoint, which is a linear presentation format with defined self-contained slides, a Prezi is built upon a single large canvas. You define a slide by drawing frames around content contained in different areas of your canvas. This gives you the freedom to zoom in and out of content areas, and rotate around portions of your canvas extremely dynamically.

Take a look at a recent Prezi we built for a customer to get a sense of the dynamic impact that can be created.

Now take a look at what the full Prezi canvas looked like for this presentation:

Here is how this Prezi was created:

• 1. First, I planned my presentation by creating an outline of what I wanted to convey on each slide. My entire presentation flow was planned out before I even attempted to build it on Prezi.
• 2. Second, I planned out graphically how I wanted to convey the points on my slides. I chose a graphic set from istockphoto.com that included nine different illustrations that I felt would give me the flexibility to build out the presentation graphics fairly easily.
• 3. With my presentation planned, I logged into my account at www.prezi.com to get started.
• 4. I started building the various slides on my canvas, and tried to find any opportunity to zoom in or out from the content areas.
• 5. I built the content slides non-linearly – which means instead of placing new content to the right of the last content in a linear path, I would randomly move it adjacent to the last content, but above or below, sometimes left, sometimes right. I did not worry about rotating anything at this point and just focused on getting the slide content placed in a non-linear flow that was interesting.
• 6. I tried to create content that was larger and smaller so zooming in and out created additional interest.
• 7. Once I was happy with the overall flow, I then went back and chose content areas to rotate so the presentation was even more dynamic. This was my last step.
• 8. I ended up presenting this using my laptop hooked up to a projector, running the presentation straight from the website which required internet access. However, internet access isn’t always available when I am presenting and I also had the option of saving a copy of this presentation in a format that can be played back without requiring internet access.

This presentation was a very short presentation – only 10-15 minutes in all. It took longer to create in Prezi (3-4 hours total) than it would have taken using PowerPoint but the end result was far more dynamic.

Here are some tips for getting started with Prezi:

• 1. Go to www.prezi.com, watch the instruction videos, and read any tutorials you can find.
• 2. Do a search in the Prezi library for your topic or other topics to view Prezis created by others. This will give some good ideas for your Prezi after seeing the many different approaches taken by others.
• 3. Start by doing a short presentation, and potentially select one of the available templates to customize instead of creating something from scratch.
• 4. Make sure each area of slide content is very close by the previous content. I found when content was farther away, the presentation became dizzying to watch, in an unpleasant way. This was particularly true if rotation was used on a more distant content area.
• 5. Try to avoid placing content linearly. I found it was a big adjustment to get away from this thinking after years of doing PowerPoints, and had to be very purposeful to place content non-linearly.

Have fun creating Prezi presentations that pop – and wow your audience!