I’m taking a hiatus from speaking in 2011 to recharge and focus on other things, but thought I’d share some of what I’ve learned from speaking over the last several years, from someone who isn’t a naturally-born speaker or expert in speaking, hates flying, and generally get anxious about combining those two activities.

Some of the follow points might be obvious for some, but they’re all important bits I try and keep in mind before every talk. I’ve learned most of them from other speakers, articles and advice from colleagues and event organizers.

Here's something we came up with to help you consider which chart to use. It was inspired by the table in Gene Zelazny's classic work Saying It With Charts (p. 27 in the 4th. ed)

COLOURlovers is a creative community where people from around the world create and share colors, palettes and patterns, discuss the latest trends and explore colourful articles... All in the spirit of love.

My slides are not designed for people who didn’t see the talk in person. They’re designed to support my words, not some online audience. What’s more, many commented that they found the design of the slides to be noteworthy. I’m expressly not a designer.

The atomic method requires you to create a slide for each sentence. For a five minute talk, that's 50 slides.

Each slide must have either a single word, a single image or a single idea.

A few years ago, we started wondering if there was a way to make a flat-sided sans serif that was disarming instead of brutish, one that employed confidence and subtlety instead of just raw testosterone. It was an unusual design brief for ourselves, completely without visual cues and trading in cultural associations instead: “more Steve McQueen than Steven Seagal,” reads one note; “whiskey highball, not a martini” suggests another.

What I will talk about is how I (and you, of course) can use the Web to find content for your talks, record them, share them with others and save them for future audiences. I’ll also explain how to share it all for free and how to convert closed formats into open ones by using the Web.

In addition to a classic story structure, the Beyond Bullet Points story template incorporates persuasive techniques that are useful for many types of presentations in different contexts. These techniques include using Aristotle's classical concept that to persuade, you need to appeal to emotion, reason, and personal credibility. Even if your intent is to simply inform audience members about something, you still have to persuade them to pay attention. Why should they listen? What's in it for them? Using this template helps you to answer these questions for your audience.

Save your audience from another dull presentation and increase their focus by building a presentation that answers their questions instead of smothering them with slides. Author Joey Asher explains how to create effective presentations built around real questions.

There are two main tools I use to create icons. The first should already be known to PowerPoint users from previous versions, and that’s the ability to edit the points of a shape. The novelty in PowerPoint 2010 is that you can right-click any shape now (not only free-form) and edit its points. The second tool I use is completely new to PowerPoint 2010 – combine shapes. You can learn about it from the videos in this blog, but to learn about all the possibilities of this tool, please check our previous blog post.

Our friends over on the Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering blog recently announced some great new features in the Excel, Word, and PowerPoint Web Apps. Among the new goodies are some brand new themes that you’ll find in the Select Theme dialog when you create a new presentation on SkyDrive. We’ve also re-organized the gallery in a way that we believe will better suit your needs.

Missed these slides by @padday 1st time around. Good look at designing social tools for different groups/relationships: http://bit.ly/cUraWz