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.

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So, I was in the bookstore and I picked up this book along with Presentation Zen, and wouldn’t you know it, shortly afterwards I see a post on the Presentation Zen blog about this book. Undeterred by being scooped by Garr Reynolds on two of the books I’ve read lately, I decided to press on and read this book anyway.

As a man who loves whiteboards and feels most comfortable in a meeting with an Expo Dry Erase marker in his hand, I was definitely keen to read Dan Roam’s Back of the Napkin in order to see what I might be able to do to improve. Fortunately for me, the book assuaged my fears that I would have to learn to draw. Which, for any of you who may have seen me at a whiteboard in the past, knows that me learning to draw well may be impossible. For those of you, who haven’t seen me at a whiteboard, picture Jackson Pollock with dry erase as his medium, combined with a doctor’s handwriting labeling everything.

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