A Prezi is a great way to wow your audience with a presentation. Prezi is a unique presentation tool that uses a zooming mechanic to mimic a video camera’s zooms and pans. But if you let the gee-whiz features of Prezi overwhelm your message, your audience will wish you had used Powerpoint, or a whiteboard and a pointer! There are as many awful Prezis as there are great ones, so we’ve detailed some tips to make the most of your zooming presentation. There are a few good resources to help you put together a remarkable Prezi (the best of which are the site’s own Learn page, and a Prezi by the Co-founder, Adam Somlai-Fischer), but such resources are scarce, and they tend to focus on listing the dos. So we’ve put together a list of don’ts to help even things out. Recent University of Maryland graduate Jason Fox, who researched this post and Friday’s part 1 on Prezi for us, made this laugh-out-loud Prezi you absolutely must see to illustrate all the things that can go wrong.
Some Bad Prezis on Prezi
You can enjoy viewing the Prezi in two ways–by clicking the forward arrow buttons to move forward step by step just as a presenter would, or by using the zoom and other controls that appear on the right side once you’ve clicked a forward arrow to explore the Prezi as you wish. A presenter can use this option, too, to make a highly interactive presentation in which s/he responds to audience interest by roaming to areas of the presentation they ask about. To recap, the key don’ts for creating a Prezi are: don’t zoom around at nausea-inducing speeds, organize your presentation in a logical way and use the visual elements to emphasize that organization—instead of overwhelming it—and don’t let the words overwhelm the pictures. This is part two of our two-part series on Prezi. (Our first introduced Prezi and compared it to Powerpoint.) When Prezi is done right, we believe it’s a valuable tool which will rise to prominence, just as video has. If MiniMatters can help you use this tip or serve your other video needs, we’d love to talk with you at 301-339-0339 or via email at [email protected]. (Regular readers of our blog may remember when we said that the young people we met at University of Maryland are amazing. Jason Fox was one of them. We gratefully acknowledge his great work on our Prezi series and especially on his dynamite bad Prezis presentation.)