1. Building presentation slides
In the previous video,
we've seen how planning is paramount before actually building slides.
2. From planning to building
Now, we should design the slides. There are some suggestions we can follow. Our slides
should support the story we are conveying.
When building the slides, we should keep in mind our audience attention capacities. It's better to have many slides with little content on each, making for a more dynamic presentation, rather than few slides with lots of content.
3. From planning to building
There's a good reason for counting slides: the idea is to prevent presenters from going over time. But we shouldn't worry about counting slides or how much time we spend on each. Instead,
4. From planning to building
we should have one message per slide. It will keep things short and fluid. Our audience can only absorb a certain amount of information at once. Trying to cover too much information simultaneously will increase the cognitive load, cloud our message, and cause our audience to miss some of the key points.
5. Color
Formatting can emphasize, or on the contrary cloud, the message we want to convey. One formatting technique is color.
Remember, everything you present should convey meaning, and everything else should be cut. So as far as colors are concerned, we use the least amount of colors needed to convey our message.
Also, we should maintain a good contrast between your text and background, to help readability.
6. Color
We also need to be attentive to potentially impaired auditors.
People who have color-vision deficiency can't distinguish between two different colors, so those people will struggle to understand the text or graph on the slides if you use green and red together.
7. Fonts
Fonts also impact readability. The research is inconclusive on which typeface is easier to read between serif and sans-serif.
The rule of thumb would be sans serif is appropriate for text that will be read on a screen, and serif is appropriate for text that will be printed.
The font choice is also contextual: Comic Sans Ms gets a bad rep, but it's a great font if presenting to kids. Not so much in a business setting.
In the end, the slide content is there to support what we're saying.
And usually, texts are hard to read not because of the font choice, but because they are long texts in a small size. Let's keep our texts short and big instead.
8. Fonts
We can also use several fonts,
change the spacing of letters and lines,
as well as use bold, italic and various font sizes.
We should use as little of these to get our message across without distracting from it.
9. Text slide
Including too much text can have a negative impact.
The audience tends to read the slide instead of listening.
10. Text slide
Instead we should write the main points supporting our message. The slides are just a support. They are not built to be consumed without a presenter: if they need to be, then a recording can do the trick - but we shouldn't dual purpose our slides into written reports.
11. Text slide
Including a slide headline helps persuade the audience to pay attention at that particular moment of the presentation. The headline should
highlight the main point of the slide,
be concise and specific,
and be visible thanks to a bigger font.
12. Text slide
Layering is a powerful tool which
breaks a complex slide into smaller points. The idea is to have a cleaner, better structured slide making it easier to focus on each part individually.
13. Text slide
Each point is presented and explained on its own,
14. Text slide
before being displayed together to wrap up the message. This approach helps focus our audience's attention.
15. Visualization slide
When we find ourselves using too much text, we should think about replacing it with a graph. People usually understand visual information much better.
16. Visualization slide
Layering and highlighting also work pretty well: we can display each graph one by one, and put them together to summarize the idea.
Highlighting the graph or part of the graph can also help us direct our audience to what we are explaining. It also works for text, to highlight an idea or a metric.
17. Visualization slide
If needed, headlines should also be used following the same guidelines that we saw for text slides.
18. Visualization slide
Finally, we should use only one or two full-size graphs per slide,
preventing us from conveying more than one message per slide,
and prevent us from overcrowding slides.
19. Let's practice!
In a nutshell, we want to deliver our message while keeping things as simple as possible, and limiting the cognitive load of the audience as much as possible.
All right, let's practice!