Tom's Notes in PPTs

You can see in the post above that Tom mentions adding notes to his slides presentations. We’d like to preempt the inevitable comments that he doesn’t have to insert blank slides to do so and provide an up-front explanation. Tom makes new top-level PPT slides for his notes instead of putting them in the Notes section under the slides because that would negate the whole effect he’s trying to create. He says, “The text slides are collectively a ‘book,’ a more or less continuous and coherent narrative that must be ‘in front of’ the reader.” (He thinks of slide show watchers as readers.) He wants people to read the slides and to read them in context as a story with a plot. Again, he tells us, “I want my message about design or talent or implementation to build almost like a book.” Moreover, he guesses the odds of someone’s reading slide text is about 10 times higher than the possibility of their reading the notes section. Finally, Tom says this: “My text slides are Slides, not Notes about slides. (In my mind.) More grandly, in a parallel to Re-imagine, I am sort of trying to invent a new medium. (I could be wrong about all this, and have it ass-backwards, of course.)”

Cathy Mosca posted this on January 15, 2008, in Tom's Slides.
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