I've just spent the day at Futuresonic, the Urban Festival of Art, Music & Ideas in Manchester. The talks I saw ranged from the unintelligible to the inspiring, but on the whole it was an enjoyable day. I was particularly impressed by Aaron Koblain's talk on data visualisation. I shan't relay what he said, but instead will simply suggest you check out some of his amazing work at his website.

What the day also got me thinking about however was the quality of presentations. Every presenter I saw today used some sort of computer presentation, all run on the venue's Macs running Apple's Keynote software. However it was clear to see which presenters had written their presentations in Keynote and which had put them together using Microsoft Powerpoint. Reason 1 was that Keynote's ability to import Powerpoint files isn't quite perfect, making for some slightly oddly aligned fonts. Reason 2 was that I recognise some of the templates provided by both pieces of software. But reason 3 was that the presentations run on Keynote were - without exception - quite simply better than the Powerpoint ones. I couldn't help but wonder why - both pieces of software offer similar functionality, so why would users of one program produce better presentations than users of the other?

What do I mean by "better", for a start? I tweeted my thoughts that Keynote presentations were better than Powerpoint ones, and one of my colleagues replied, "Keynote gives you better starting points, (having used it), which helps people learn how to do better". He's probably right, I would certainly agree that the backgrounds, fonts and layouts in Keynote's presentations are on the whole more stylish than those provided by Powerpoint. Keynote's font rendering, gradients, shadows and other effects are also generally smoother. But I think there's more to it than that...

Powerpoint has got something of a bad reputation in recent years, but it's not that using a Powerpoint presentation is necessarily a bad thing, it's that you need to use them appropriately. Slides should include graphics, photos and other visual elements, plus possibly some quotes, numbers, or short pieces of salient information. They should not include large blocks of text, they should rarely include bullet points, and they should never contain a transcript of what the presenter intends to say. They are an aide to the speaker, a way to enhance the presentation, not the core of it. They should rarely include background images and should always place legibility ahead of fanciness. And pointless elements like large headers/footers or random coloured sidebars or irrelevant graphical elements just get in the way of your content. At Futuresonic, the Keynote presenters stuck to these sorts of rules, whereas the Powerpoint guys didn't. Why would that be? Perhaps the slide templates in Keynote have less elements on them and shorter blocks of larger text, but I'm not sure whether that's particularly the case. And certainly either software will enable you to create both great and horrific presentations. I rather like the cartoon to the left, which tells us a lot.

So perhaps it's down to experience and influence. Would it be churlish of me to suggest that His Steveness might have something to do with it? Perhaps... just perhaps, the Keynote users (as Mac users by definition) have watched one or more of Steve Jobs' presentations at Macworld or other events. He is, after all, a superb presenter. And just look at some examples of his slides: (Photos from TechShowNetwork)

So who knows. But personally, I'll be sticking with Keynote, and doing my best to write good presentations.