By Ashley Wilkinson

Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design, has a way of making you feel like you’re the only person in the room. Even at her own book signing.

Duarte Design, the presentation design firm founded by Nancy and her husband Mark in 1988, celebrated its 20th Anniversary at the slide:ology book signing on Sept 25th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View – in style. In typical Duarte fashion, the venue was transformed into a thing of beauty –- with live jazz, lantern lighting, and the tastiest food we’d all noshed in a while. More importantly the occasion assembled Nancy’s special community — clients, family, friends, designers and admirers – all there to see her in the flesh, just being Nancy, connecting with a roomful of people on a 1:1 basis. VIDEO: slide:ology Book Trailer

Seemingly effortlessly, Nancy tells stories and connects with people. VIDEO: You are a Natural Born (Visual) Storyteller Her client roster is a global Who’s Who at the intersection of business, technology and cause-related endeavors, and their loyalty is a testament to the quality of counsel she provides. Her book, like her mission, helps companies clearly and passionately communicate what it is they want to say – in order to convince VCs to invest, salesforces to sell, or in the case of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth presentation, to convince a global audience to save our planet from peril.

A pioneer in the field of presentation design, on par with visual communication rockstars Garr Reynolds and Guy Kawasaki, Nancy wrote her first book, slide:ology, for the purpose of sharing her secrets for success. For her, success means saving the world one slide at a time, by helping companies articulate their message, their mission, and their purpose.

Who is Nancy “saving,” you ask? She’s saving all of us – venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, CEOs, salesforces, managers, students, teachers, business developers, engineers — from ourselves and from one another through effective, impactful presentation design. This may sound ridiculous unless you, yourself, have faced “death by PowerPoint,” or have endured hours in an airless room at the mercy of a misguided presentation, punctuated only by stale data, tiny font and meaningless bullet points hung on a screen 50 feet away.

Nancy’s quest is to UNDO all of that, and her methodology for presentation design mirrors that which she uses to connect with people. Think stories and laughter, color and warmth, life and perspective. This is Nancy’s redesigned world.

With presentations being the second most commonly used method of communication (second only to email), anyone in business or academia knows Nancy’s mission is a call to revolution: Communicate Better. Her plan for revolution can be found in the pages of her book, where she also gives readers the tools to participate. VIDEO: VizThink Webinar

Is it any wonder slide:ology has consistently topped the Amazon Best Seller List since its August release, and sales have required a second printing? Although you may not have seen the lanterns at her book signing, reading slide:ology will give you a glimpse of the brave new world, as Nancy envisions it. And it will make you feel like you know her, too.

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