Naba Ahmed
February 01, 2023
Most people were not taught about conversational presenting — a different approach to delivering a presentation that allows room for audience interaction — in school. Often, we were tasked with creating linear, static slide decks for assignments and projects, but not how to create powerful presentations that will be memorable for our audience.
“Presentations are for listeners, not for the people talking,” said Davide Luzzati, founder of presentation consultancy Luzz Presents. “You have to build the slides for the people that are listening to you, not for yourself. This is the main issue and even today, people haven’t understood this.”
After working in the tourism industry for more than 30 years, Davide realized that he needed to create a space for people to improve their presentation structure, design, and delivery. This is why in 2017, he founded Luzz Presents in Genoa, Italy.
“When you look around, most people have pretty average presentations, so I was dedicated to starting a company around helping people improve theirs,” Davide said.
Luzz Presents is a full-service consultancy agency, offering presentation, graphic design, and training services centered around Prezi. He thought about also offering services for PowerPoint or Keynote to his clients, but he chose to dedicate his services to Prezi because of how it shook up the presentation space.
“It’s changed the way that I was looking at presentations. Thanks to Prezi, I learned that I need to be asking ‘What’s the most important part you want to transfer to your audience?’” Davide added.
Davide’s interest in wanting to learn how to create the most compelling presentations and advancing his experience with Prezi is what prompted him to become a Prezi Certified Educator Trainer, which is a part of a certification program that aims to help educators and trainers learn how to effectively use Prezi tools to support instruction.
However, it’s more than just knowing the software. It’s also about how you use it.
“You could easily add 30 lines of text on a slide, but once you understand that that’s not effective, you can move to the next step of using a unique presentation software, like Prezi,” Davide said. “When you use Prezi, it’s a big help because you can organize your thoughts into topics and subtopics, use the zoom effect for emphasis, etc.”
Davide sees Prezi as a canvas, and has even designed a Prezi presentation using Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Vitruvian Man” as the framework for an anesthesiology presentation.
Know your basics
While Prezi has three different products, Davide stresses the importance of knowing Prezi Present.
“The baseline, I would say, is Prezi Present,” Davide stated. “That’s the most important because if you don’t know Prezi Present, you won’t get the most out of the other products.”
This year, Davide already has big plans with Prezi. In March, Davide will be using Prezi to teach an online course about presentation tips. He is also creating a 140-slide training presentation for an international food company, and is going to use Prezi Video to create TV spots for a local company in Italy.
“Prezi Video is astonishing,” Davide said. “It makes such a difference because you actually can still keep eye contact with your audience.”
His biggest plan for this year is to become even more in tune with Prezi. In Italy, Prezi is not that well known and Davide aims to become the “Prezi person in Italy” to help everyone there with their presentation needs and advance their presentation skills.
“I believe that Prezi gave me, and many people, the possibility to change the way you approach a presentation,” Davide added. “It’s so simple to build in, but so revolutionary.”
