Healthcare Napkins wins SlideShare Best Presentation Contest for 2009

Healthcare Napkins All, a PowerPoint presentation created by Dan Roam with Dr Tony Jones, has won the SlideShare’s World’s Best Presentation Contest 2009. The winning presentation summarizes the healthcare issue in US via simple napkin drawings.


According to SlideShare, ‘Healthcare Napkins All’ is not only engaging, but it manages to get through healthcare in 57 slides that are easy on the eyes. The winner was selected from over 3,750 entries submitted from over 130 countries for the contest.

“If we really want our audience to engage and understand, we must create presentations that invite our audiences in,” Dan Roam has said. “Simple, hand-drawn pictures draw people in. Preaching to our audience through bullet points or overwhelming them with mounds of undifferentiated data does not. The standard PowerPoint approach actually closes down discussion. If we really want to make our message stand out, we have to make it look human.”

The SlideShare contest rewarded three overall winners and five category winners. ‘Sheltering Wings’ by Sarah Cullem and ‘Feels Bad on the Back’ by Mohamad Faried won the second and third prize respectively.

The five category prizes were won by ‘24 Reasons Why Twitter Sucks!’ (Technology); ‘Eco-nomics, The hidden costs of consumption’ (Business); ‘Simplicity in Creative/Offbeat, A crime so monstrous’ (Education), and ‘Who Is This Guy’ (About Me).

Finalists were chosen by a panel of judges comprising technology leaders Padmasree Warrior, CTO, Cisco; Guy Kawasaki, managing director, Garage Technology Ventures; and David Armano, founding member, Dachis group and author of Logic + Emotion.

“The top entries were brilliantly crafted both in terms of aesthetics and information design,” Rashmi Sinha, CEO, SlideShare, has said. “They dealt with topical issues; and their popularity on and off SlideShare shows the power of social media when coupled with great content.”