The Lessig Style

I'm a fan of Stanford professor Larry Lessig. Both his presentations and the way he designs them. I first stumbled across one of his talks at the TED site, How Creativity is being Strangled by the Law. I tried to explain the power of his talks to a friend and the best I could come up with were two words: minimal and compelling.

A physicist, Chris Tunnell, wrote a nice piece about the Lessig Style. The author discusses how using these same methods have made his own presentations more popular. He listed the following keypoints of the Lessig Style.

• Minimal Text
• XML Tags
• Re-using images
• Knowing your next slide
• Blank slides

I might add only one item to the list and that is that the presentation is driven by the content. In most cases I feel like Lessig could lose the slides altogether and I would still listen. The slides support him not the other way around. The only thing I don't think I will use in my own presentations are the XML Tags. It works for him. The tags create his "style".

There are lots of Lessig presentations on the web but what I like about the TED presentation I've linked to is that you can see Lessig as he is talking. It's more like what I would expect in a classroom. You don't have to agree with him to appreciate his craftsmanship. Check him out.

[Image captured from TED talk: How Creativity is being Strangled by the Law: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/187]

How creativity is being strangled by the law

Interesting talk by Larry Lessig about copyright. He is involved with the Creative Commons and has some interesting things to say about the extremists on both sides of the issue and what it's doing to our country and our culture.

Here is a rough quote from the video:

We live in this weird time. An age of prohibitions where in many areas of our life we live constantly against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law. And that is what we are doing to our kids. They live life knowing they live it against the law. That realisation is extraordinarily corrosive.

[Image: Original image taken from the TED web page on Larry Lessig: http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/view/id/167]