Happy Halloween everybody! Above is an entry to this year’s annual Duarte Pumpkin contest. It’s posted here, because of this month’s book… Slide:ology and it’s author Nancy Duarte. I posted earlier about Presentation Zen and Garr Reynolds, and Nancy and Garr are good friends, in fact the whitespace on the cover of Slide:ology is Garr’s silhouette. Well, Slide:ology is a great compliment to Presentation Zen, it takes things from a very practical perspective around images, colors, transitions, everything. Duarte (the firm) was responsible for all the visuals in An Inconvenient Truth.
Nancy was nice enough to do an interview with me about her book and her career. Please see an excerpt below.
PP: Can you tell us about the first slideshow you remember?
ND: Aside from the filmstrips I saw in school, the first professional slideshow was when I used to sell heat shrink tubing for Raychem (sp), and I had never seen a 35 mm slide done professionally. I remember I asked everyone after they presented there how it was done, it was beautiful. The reds were red, the golds were gold. It had the product shots of the products. I remember being really enamored with the slides, and nobody could tell me how they were done. Then I started to do it.
PP: How did that evolve from nobody knowing how it was done, to doing slides professionally yourself?
ND: We fell into it; my husband had a little tiny ad and it wound up helping build slides for Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in 1989. So we started right off developing slides, and then we got niched in slides. We actually had a slide imager, so we actually did make the 35mm slides. I had to wear the cotton gloves, and glass mount them in the middle of the night and produce tem, then we would FedEx them to wherever the executive was going to be. We’ve lived a full life in presentations.
PP: So these were with the slide carousels?
ND: Yeah I still have my carousel. I use it occasionally during photo shoots to project weird things on the wall.
PP: So you were using 35 mm cameras to capture images and put them into presentations?
ND: We actually started with a digital imager, so we could output from PowerPoint and Persuasion and applications like that. At the time we just lived in a little condo across the tracks from our current office. We had a 35 mm slide imager. It cost us $17,000 to buy this little piece of equipment to make these little 35 mm slides. Then we had to run down to Stanford Mall to get the images developed into slides. It was crazy. Then we would rush from counter to counter to put it on airplanes so the slides would get there the same time the executive arrived. It was quite a process.
PP: You’re starting professionally; you need $17,000 for a piece of equipment that’s a lot of money for anybody, particularly back then. How did you make that initial investment?
ND: My husband and I aren’t real spenders. So we don’t have a lot of things that we need on this earth. So we put everything back in the business. So when he started it, I was actually working full-time at a real job when he started the company. I joined the company two years later in 1990. Every penny he made from the business he put back into the business. Everything we bought back then was 10x what it costs today. We lived so tight in a little tiny apartment. We even rented out our master suite to my sister-in-law to help cover the rent. It was a total bootstrap.
PP: So you guys are still close today I hope?
ND: *laughs* Yeah, we are, we are.
PP: How did the practice evolve from those days?
ND: So I joined my husband in 1990. I actually spent a lot of time trying to get him to quit this stupid idea he had. I put a lot of energy into that. He actually begged me, “Please just read a MacWorld magazine, just read it and tell me that you don’t think it’s the vision of the future.”
So I did, and then I made three calls that afternoon and we won all three accounts. We haven’t had to make a cold call since, it’s all been word of mouth. I called Apple, Tandem and NASA and we won all three accounts. And from then it was word of mouth all the way up until the book was written. And then we promoted the book, which wasn’t really promoting Duarte, it was promoting the book. So it was kind of fun. It just kind of perpetuated.
Once we got known for the niche, then people as they spread to new jobs, people kept calling and calling and calling for this niche. Even in the dot-com crash, all our web and print work went away; our presentation work just kept calling and calling and calling. It was clear then. This presentation work is the real deal. This is what we are the best in the world at. This is what we are passionate about. So we dropped everything else and we only do presentations now.
PP: So you started out a bit broader and then focused on your segment of presentations.
ND: Yeah, and presentation that doesn’t mean PowerPoint necessarily. It means on the web, on devices, on the stage, digital signage, any way a presentation needs to be delivered. We definitely just do presentation now.
PP: How did you get involved with Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth?
ND: He’s a great client, we still work with him. We were actually referred to him by Apple. He had just joined their board, and they were originally supposed to build his presentation for him. However since you can’t get products or services from the company if you’re on the board, Apple batted him to us, because we do a lot of work for them too.
We actually started with him for about 3 years before it was a movie. He just toured around the country, passionately preaching his cause. Then we heard about the movie, and we were shocked. A movie about a slideshow, eh? *Laughs.*
Now he is just as adamantly out there talking and presenting it, it’s been very fun.
PP: How were the working sessions on An Inconvenient Truth?
ND: It’s funny I’ve had a range of clients, from buttheads to really, really bright people. He is probably our most courteous and open-minded client. He comes to us and says, “Here’s what I want to say, how do you propose I display this, how do you propose that’s conveyed visually?” He defers to us as the experts. Sometimes we get these 23 year olds CEO start up dudes that want to come and tell us how to do our jobs. It’s such a play in contrasts for me, from a global leader you tell me how you think this should be displayed, to this kid who thinks he knows everything. He just sends us gifts and cards, he’s just so… political. *Laughs* He’s so appropriate about everything. He’s been just delightful.
PP: You’ve kind of started a movement with better presentations. You look at people like Garr Reynolds, and his Presentation Zen book, and you guys do things together all the time. When did you realize that you started a movement and this community out there to make sure that bullets don’t kill not only people but presentations?
ND: I’m so pleased; it really turns my crank to hear people say you started a movement, because that’s what we kind of started out to do. I’d been holed away running the business; I needed to take some time to look around. So I hired a president who took on a massive amount of my load, and that’s when I found Garr. I dropped him a note, and asked him “Where have you been all my life?” I thought I had been fighting this battle alone. That’s when we decided to join forces to start a movement which has been really powerful.
So when I was looking around doing all this research, I found these young guys who were like, “Let’s start a revolution, let’s not do slides the way our mom does slides!” And I’m like, “I’m old enough to be your mom, and I haven’t been doing slides like your mom does slides for 20 years.” I felt like I was William Wallace at the end of Braveheart, marching and telling people we’re almost at the end.
So it’s good, its good seeing a tipping point, and what’s really amazing to me is that audiences are expecting more and audiences deserve more. So what I see happening is a reverse pressure on the presenter to talk to the audience in a way that lets them know you’ve done your homework, and you’re trying to make something that is meaningful for them and doesn’t waste an hour of their time. So the pressure from the audience is going to be great to see. It takes more time and more planning and more thoughtfulness, but it makes a big difference.
PP: Who are some of your favorite presenters, besides Al Gore and Steve Jobs?
ND: I think most of the people on TED. They’re some of the best in the world in short form video presentations. I don’t know that they’re all fantastic at incorporating slides. We’re working on a couple that I think will be fantastic, that aren’t quite done yet. You know, I get asked that all the time and sadly I can’t think of one. Also, there are no women who are iconic presenters, where you’re like “that’s the one”. There’s only a couple who are truly iconic and use the medium well. There’s the comedian Dmitri, who’s uses charts and he’s really, really good. He incorporates his video or visual aid really well, its seamless, and it adds to the value of the message. Bill McDonough is a really excellent presenter as well. He’s the big green architect. His work is featured in the book. He does a fantastic job as far as using his voice and the media to really change the world.
Paul