Tips

Thank you for agreeing to give a presentation at Ignite Sydney. We’re extremely grateful for your help in making this a stand-out event.

The Rules of Ignite

The Ignite format is really simple. You must have 20 slides, and each slide must change automatically after 15 seconds.

To get an idea of what it’s all about, take 5 minutes and watch this:

An excellent talk, with a clear message told simply, with minimal text.

Putting your slides together

Before you fire up your laptop, consider the advice of Slide:ology and go analog. Use post-it notes to plan what you really want to say.

Treat the slides like a set of index cards that you use to prompt yourself for the next point. That way, if you get slightly out of sync with the slides it won’t matter so much. (If you try to rattle through a list of bullet points you will inevitably mess up the timing).

Use a single idea per slide, and illustrate it with a nice clear image. You can download free (or cheap) legal photos from the URLs listed on the Presentation Zen site.

At all costs, avoid text-heavy “death by powerpoint” slides as these definitely don’t work for Ignite. Keep the number of words on each slide to a minimum – 5 words is plenty, since it’s just a headline.

Avoid putting anything important at the very top or bottom of the slide, as this may be cut off or hard to see from some parts of the room.

Start strong

You don’t need to talk about yourself on the first slide – the MC will introduce you, and explain where you’re from and what you’ll be talking about. This means you can launch straight into an exciting and compelling opening, and grab the audience’s attention from the first slide – like a good action film.

But (especially if you topic is technical) don’t assume the audience knows what you’re talking about. Those acronyms may mean something to you, but to us they could be meaningless. Put yourself in our shoes and make sure it still makes sense.

Can I use animations?

We don’t allow the use of animations like moving text, images appearing after a delay, embedded videos, etc. They’re mostly distracting, often fail, and are unnecessary in the Ignite format – you’ve only got 15 seconds, so don’t waste it with animations.

Great use of cartoons to simplify things and keep them fun

Some suggestions

Do it without notes! If you structure your slides to be like index cards, the slide itself should act as your prompter and you won’t need to refer to notes. There will be a monitor facing the presenter so you won’t need to look back at the screen.

Make sure you practise your presentation a few times in front of a live audience (your partner, your colleagues, your cat) to get your timing right. You’ll be amazed how fast the 5 minutes actually goes.

There is an excellent article here written by an Ignite presenter, giving advice on how to put your talk together, and here is some great advice from previous Ignite Sydney presenter Mark Pollard.

Most of all, remember that Ignite is meant to be a bit of fun – it’s an antidote to all the boring conferences and lectures that people are used to. So make your presentation entertaining, grab a drink, and enjoy yourself.

An Ignite talk about giving Ignite talks? How post-modern

What format?

If you’re using PowerPoint (Windows), save your slides in either PPT or PPTX. If you’re using Keynote (Mac), save your slides in Keynote 09 format. Please note that we don’t use Presenter’s View so be prepared for this.

Don’t worry about the 15 second timing on the slides if you don’t know how to do it – we can set that up for you.

The projector will be set to a low resolution of 1024 x 768 so don’t include any fine details – you should be able to read your slides clearly while standing a few feet away from your laptop. If you can’t see it, neither can the audience.

Simple slides, with a single bullet point per slide

Stuck?

If you need any help, or you’re stuck for ideas, drop us an email at info@ignitesydney.com and we’ll do our best to help.

Thanks again, and see you on the night.