Presentation Hero provides a blueprint and provides a set of indications, but actually there are no rules. You’re in front of a fantastic opportunity. You’re in front of a blank canvas each time you create a presentation, both in terms of structure and in terms of design.

Whenever you want to create a presentation you know a powerful storytelling blueprint, but at the same time, you are totally free to decide not to follow it. For instance, you might want to start your presentation from a summary and you just flip the structure and you know that you’re not following it, but you still know what each step brings to your audience. Maybe, you don’t want to feature just one concept per slide, but you want to feature more of them. Well, you’re breaking a rule, but you’re free to do it.

Learn the rules and learn what the rules mean, but at the same time allow yourself to break them. Think like an artist. Presentations are a totally creative space.

Now is a good time to summarize what we did in this whole module:

We started by eliminating the computer, by thinking about how our structure could give form to our design process, and thinking about the unit of content of our presentation, the slide. Then we started to deal with the slides, thinking about not using them and having just talking points (using this whole process, but just with talking points).

We thought about how many concepts to have per slide, about the idea of sketching them on paper first, and starting with the text so that we have our text neatly organized before we start creating our slides. Then we started approaching the design, thinking about what to design for our audience, starting to understand something technical about the output format, and finding on-demand inspiration to find our own visual style.

Then we worked on the elemental pieces of design: color, typography, and layout. And the idea is to have those before you start compiling the presentation. And this is where we bring it all together by compiling, by editing the presentation, and most importantly, by timing it. And finally, this lesson about not having rules.

Congratulations! You’ve just finished this module, it’s really time to celebrate because you’re on the way to becoming a Presentation Hero. There’s no better time to share your accomplishment and to invite your peers into the same journey, because if you’re the only one, you’re not going to save the world from bad presentations. You need to recruit more people.

Summary:

• Think like an artist, learn the rules to break them