Presentation Design for Smart People
MJ Truong · Meyer Innovation Factory Lead
A designer walks you through narrative structure and slide hierarchy with real TED-talk breakdowns, though it never opens a design tool.
A structural framework before a design one
The course's real spine is the "narrative arc," MJ Truong's term for treating a presentation's outline like a story rather than a checklist of talking points. Rather than leave that concept abstract, the course splits it into three named categories: persuasive, narrative, and explanatory, each with its own arc. Persuasive presentations move through setting the stage, exploring evidence, proposing the solution, and covering execution. Narrative presentations run through context, catalyst, climb, crux, and closure. Explanatory presentations get their own outline built around introducing a topic, delivering content in a logical progression, and closing with a call to action or summary.
What makes this section land is the willingness to point at specific, real talks and break them apart beat by beat. Alan Siegel's TED talk on legal jargon, the 2010 iPad launch, Alain de Botton's talk on success, and Stacy Smith's talk on Hollywood representation each get walked through stage by stage, showing exactly where the evidence ends and the proposal begins. A business example, pitching a CEO on hiring a social media team, translates the same structure into a corporate meeting, which is useful for the built-in audience of people making work presentations rather than TED talks.
The storyboard section is a natural extension of this planning work: before opening any slide software, the course asks students to sketch what each slide will show, so that visual decisions follow from the outline rather than get invented slide by slide. This ordering, structure first, storyboard second, slides last, is the course's most defensible pedagogical choice, and it is reinforced at the end with a full checklist covering narrative structure, outline, storyboard, slide design, scripting, and delivery practice.
Where the design half runs thin
Part two shifts to visual hierarchy, covering how header slides, table-of-contents slides, and repeated case-study formats should stay consistent across a deck so the audience can track structural cues by sight. Font and color guidance follows a similar shape: safe sans-serif recommendations, warnings against overused defaults, and a caution that serif fonts skew formal. None of this is wrong, and the "avoid confusing infographics" and "avoid corny stock images" advice is fair, but it stays at the level of do's and don'ts rather than technique. Truong says outright that typography isn't a personal specialty, and that honesty is appreciated, but it also means the design half of the course reads thinner than the structural half.
The layout demos, recreating a Pinterest-inspired slide live, show a process worth watching once but do not substitute for a repeatable method the way the narrative arcs do. Students hoping to leave with concrete slide-software skills, keyboard shortcuts, alignment tools, specific effects, will find only a brief nitty-gritty section on distribution, alignment, and simple crossfade transitions.
Overall, this is a course about thinking clearly before designing, more than a course about designing. For that narrower goal it delivers cleanly, with enough named examples and structural detail to actually change how someone plans their next talk.
The standout
The four-part persuasive arc, demonstrated against Alan Siegel's TED talk, the 2010 iPad launch, and a real pitch for hiring a social media team, is concrete enough to lift directly into a business deck.
What you will learn
- Identify which of three presentation types you're building (persuasive, narrative, explanatory) and pick its underlying arc
- Structure a persuasive talk in four beats: set the stage, explore evidence, propose the solution, cover execution
- Build a narrative presentation using context, catalyst, climb, crux, and closure
- Turn an outline into a storyboard before touching any slide software
- Apply visual hierarchy principles so headers, list slides, and case-study sections look consistent throughout a deck
- Choose and pair fonts using safe sans-serif and serif defaults instead of guessing
Best for: Someone who already has a presentation to build for work or school and wants a repeatable structure for the content before worrying about slide polish.
Skip it if: Anyone hoping for hands-on software instruction in PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides, or a designer already fluent in typography and layout principles.