Last night I did an Ignite talk at DemoCamp Toronto 20. It was my second time presenting, but first time doing an Ignite. Some lessons learned from doing it…
- Ummm, practice. No, really.
- You will get tripped up. Accept it and recover
- 15 seconds a slide is a long time
- 15 seconds a slide is a short time
- If you get ahead of yourself, just keep going. You will catch up. I should have talked about slide 2 during slide 1 which caused me to get behind on slide 3
- Have I mentioned practicing?
- If you write cheat sheets, make sure you can read them
- Having a fuzzy idea of what you want to say is more effective than having a specific thing you want to say
- Not everything works on evenly spaced auto-advancing slides. Some of my slides could have used slower advance, others longer
- Cheat as much as possible. I didn’t, but should have
- Remember to have fun
- Practice seems like a good idea
Anyways, my talk was right before the pizza and was based on The Legend of Zealot Anarchist Robot. You might want to open that in another browser before going through the slides; they don’t make much sense otherwise.
Here are the credits for where I lifted all the photos from. In order.
Good list. Another thing would be to watch some videos of ignite presentations (or see some events live) before presenting.
I’ve noticed that I get more words out in front of a live audience, but your observations of needing more or less time seem dead on.
Perhaps you should mention in your list that practice is a good idea.