How do you even start building a presentation. Where do you begin. What steps do you take to do it well. People fantasize that great decks just burst into existence like Athena from Zeus’ skull. They don’t. They are engineered.

The most common crime in the world of slides is what I call chaos mode. The author always denies it. They call it “spontaneous”. Spontaneous sounds like jazz. Chaos sounds like a toddler with a chainsaw. The effect in presentations is roughly the same. Spontaneity in decks breeds chaos. The good ones you remember are never improvised. They are the product of a process. The tighter your process, the tighter your talk. So what is the process. Let’s start at the beginning.