Yesterday, I had the chance to spend eight great hours with two of the best people in the presentation design business: Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte. I attended their very first Presentation Reboot workshop and came away filled with a wealth of new ideas and approaches for creating and delivering killer presentations. I’ve been a long time fan of Garr’s and Nancy’s and was so glad when they announced a joint-effort to put on the Presentation Reboot workshops this week. The workshop was held at Duarte Design’s offices in Mountain View, California and the class was filled with about 30 very interesting and diverse people from as far away as Japan.  Read the rest of this post

What makes an innovation successful? What makes it have great impact? What makes it so successful that we don’t even notice it’s ubiquity? One word: SIMPLICITY. No one seemed to understand this better in the last half-century than Charles Harrison. Charles Harrison is not exactly a household name. But you know him. Well, you know his products. But, the products he designed have become so ubiquitous that you probably don’t even think about them. Plastic garbage bins, the Fisher-Price View-Master, Craftsman power tools, lawn mowers, hair dryers, toasters…the list in practically endless. Harrison was an industrial product designer for the Sear Roebuck Company from 1961 to 1993. During that time he designed over 750 products that Americans and people worldwide came to know and use on a regular basis.  Read the rest of this post