Andrei's blog

About Takahashi Method

TL;DR

Takahashi method uses presentations with 1-2 words per slide, usually the keyword of the topic. (Minimalism, no background, nothing fancy.) As a joke, that costed me ~24 hours, I made a very bloated tool for making them. For word count purposes, a section about Japanese design is included.

The Takahashi Method

Takahashi method became famous after Masayoshi Takahashi (a Japanese programmer) held a talk at RubyConf (for Ruby the programming language) using this method, and people thought it was cool. Supposedly he didn't have access to software necessary to make a traditional presentation, so he came up with this method.12

Slide Example:

Slide from my own tool I made

The idea is to put only the most important word or phrase on each slide (mimicking newspaper headlines), this makes the main idea significantly clearer to the audience. It works much better for short talks, where you are trying to engrave some simple idea into the mind of the audience (in Thinking Fast and Slow you are targeting System 1 and not System 2). For more complicated presentations the method won't work, because you are actually trying to present a lot of information and long bloated slides help understand complicated topics.

Presentations should be well designed, if the topic is complicated, the slides should be diagrams and the presenter should be helping to interpret them. In my personal opinion the presenter should convey more information than the slides (otherwise the entire presentation might as well be a blog post). Unfortunately in many presentations, the presenter puts all information on the slides and simpley reads it aloud, making it all a bit pointless. Takahashi method solves this problem by removing even more information, putting the presenter back in focus.

You can put on subtitles if you really really want what you say to be on the screen. I actually like it when "video essays" on YouTube have the script on the screen next to the (boring) stock images, because it helps catch anything you miss. But subtitles and script are still left in the dust by animated keywords appearing on the screen.

Minimalism. For some mysterious reason all famous principles are always about simplicity and useability. Customizeability feels like a sirene trying to lure you in, but minimalism wins once again.

How can you make a Takahashi presentation?

Well, there are many tools you could use for that.

After digging through all of them I recommend going with the KISS principle and just use PowerPoint, Google Slides or Keynote LibreOffice.

But (this is where you should be stuffing your ears with wax) I have dug up a bunch of tools to make the entire process 10 times more complicated. (And when I say dug up, I mean copy pasted from Wikipeida and did 1 search on github.)

Of course all the apps on the list are open source, not available in normal App Stores, and impossible to use unless you are an advanced tech nerd

So I made one

Just to keep up the irony of this entire situation going, I made by an extremely bloated tool to make Takahashi method presentations. You need a bloated tool to make minimalistic presentations, right?

I present to you a masterpiece that took me ~24h of work (80% of it was spent on debugging features you will never use, rest assured), and I can proudly claim that it doesn't actually solve any of the problems any of the above mentioned tools have... yeah! :)

In my defense it was my first time doing Web Development.

Demo

Try

Here is the github repository filled with todos and unhelpfull usage instructions.

It does the same thing as sent sent: interprets a text file into a presentation but in the browser. As an additional feature you can download it as a (probably broken) HTML file.

Screenshot of my tool with the menu open

A bit about Japanese Web and Culture

When I heard about the Takahashi Method I got some deja vu like I have heard quite a few things about Japanese design principles lately. A lot of it probably has to do with me reading Design of Everyday Things and learning a bunch of quotes from Japanese manufacturers.

As I noted before, all famous principles are always about simplicity and never about customizability (though there are a few about being flexible and Jack of All Trades sort of things.) Japan and South Korea have been very fast adapters of new technologies.

I am pretty sure the Cyberpunk visions of the digital age are much more associated with East Asia rather than the Western World. (If you don't know western countries are significantly lagging behind in internet speed, it just looks so "innovative" because the comparison is with developing countries from Africa and South America.)

They were early adapters of the early web and things such as Emojis.

Although Eastern culture seemingly to admire simplicity, the Japanese web is ironically bloated, mostly because of the legacy of the early web, and the ability to cram more information into smaller numbers of symbols (latin is significantly more inefficient).

When I was little, I remember "modern" minimalist design being associated with the West, now however now I have the opinion like East Asia is associated with modernism, while Europe and North America are stuck in the Middle Ages and Roaring 20s respectively (probably more due to some documented bias rather than facts).

Famous Japanese Companies with interesting design stories behind them:

Japanese car manufacturers famous for making the perfect (well designed) cars in around (2000-2010) (not anymore though, everyone is now selling trucks in the US, and they are a bit of a privacy nightmare)4.

There are other companies as well that sometimes just appear somewhere in the depths of History articles or documentaries notifying me that they are from East Asia.

Conclusion

Well, I guess I learned that minimalism = good. Again. And learned a few things about Japanese culture. All at the cost of procrastinating on many things in favor of fighting JavaScript hours on end just to make a tool I am fairly certain I won't use in the foreseeable future.

- very qualified presentation expert

Footnotes:

  1. Living large: "Takahashi Method" uses king-sized text as a visual by Garr Reynolds on Presentation Zen a website with presenting advice/blog.↩

  2. Wikipedia on the Takahashi Method, the short article has no sources and only a few links to Takahashi presentation tools.↩

  3. suckless.org are fairly famous for developing minimalist simple tools (that are impossible to use unless you know Linux inside out.)↩

  4. I recommend digging through the Mozilla's "*Privacy Not Included" blog, it has mountains of usefull information.↩