How to create a presentation for your speaker

Streamline the process of creating slides for your speaker

Not all of us who work in communications are blessed with a strong design sense—we’re usually good with words, and we leave the design and image creation to the experts. But communications people are eventually called on to create smart, informative and eye-catching slides for an executive presentation—usually under some insanely tight deadline.

For those times when you are pressed into the “slide jockey” role, Nancy Duarte, presentation design maven and author of slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, offers some advice. Duarte, principal of Duarte Design in Mountain View, Calif., says the task of creating a presentation for someone else is made tougher by the fact that executives believe they are defined by their presentation style.