I’m giving two talks at the 2009 ESRI Developer Summit conference coming up in a few weeks.

One session is a “Notes from the Field” talk that will be focused on designing sites for the GeoWeb, and the other will be a “user talk” on Unit Testing.

Since I’ve been doing an informal series of posts on presenting, I thought I’d do a few posts about how I create my slide decks and prepare for the talks.

Envisioning

For me, one of the most difficult parts of a talk is getting all my interesting “tidbit ideas” sorted out into a coherent whole that has a sensible flow. As most good books on presenting will tell you – it’s best to start analog. I use post-it notes and sharpie markers.

This is what the outline for my “Notes from the Field” talk looks like. The post-it colors do not mean anything special other than I ran out of orange pretty early on. And although there are only ~20 post-it’s this will expand into ~100-150 slides.

At this point I’m just mapping out concepts, key points and some visual ideas that I may integrate. No doubt it will be a packed 45 minutes, but it will be interesting. I’ll post more over the coming weeks.