Well-designed charts in your slide deck can convey meaningful insights where words alone would struggle to do so.
Poorly-designed charts in your slide deck can smother your presentation with confusion and invite mocking from your audience.
Do you know the difference?
In this article, we introduce four core principles for designing charts for slides, and then derive twenty practical guidelines you can use. We also feature many examples to illustrate these guidelines.
When your presentation ends, what would you like your audience to think:
It always surprises me when I encounter a speaker who wants their slide fonts to stand out, as if it were reasonable compensation for a lack of compelling content.
Great design of slide fonts means that they are easy to read and otherwise not noticeable. You want your message to stand out and be memorable, not your slide fonts.
In this article, we look at simple guidelines to help you make wise font choices so that you, and not your fonts, are memorable.
Quick… think back to the last slide presentation you attended.
If you are nodding to that last question (and most people reading this will be), you already know that most slide titles are pretty mundane: they are quickly written and quickly forgotten.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Slide titles can help communicate your message, and set the context of the slide for your audience.
In this article, we discuss five simple guidelines you can use to quickly improve your slides, and see how these guidelines apply to slide examples.
Presenters, teachers, and students all resist design-centered slide design on the basis of a perceived lack of time. Since I know that the visually-driven, Zen approach works, I am not deterred by this resistance; instead, I use one simple phrase to help cultivate strong design from presenters whose time is limited.
If you want to create beautiful, impactful, and audience-centered slides but don’t have 20 hours or more to devote to designing a slide deck, just remember the acronym C-R-A-P *, and create slides that embody strong Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity.
You’ve just been asked to give a project update to your colleagues at next week’s lunch-hour seminar.
Quick…
How many slides will you use?
How much text can you put on them?
How long should you speak — the whole hour, or less?
Don’t know? Guy Kawasaki, a famous author and venture capitalist, has the answers and they may surprise you.
Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte, and Cliff Atkinson are the authors of three hugely popular books on presentation design in the last five years.
What else do all three have in common? They all point to Richard E Mayer’s Multimedia Learning as recommended reading for presentation design.
And I agree.
This article is the latest of a series of public speaking book reviews here on Six Minutes.
Designing attractive slide visuals does not need to be a painful task. You don’t need to hire a design firm. You don’t need loads of expensive software.
You can design attractive visuals by following simple guidelines. One of these simple guidelines is the Rule of Thirds — a composition technique borrowed from photography and other visual arts that works wonderfully in PowerPoint.
In this article, you will learn:
If you want to master visual communication, this book is for you.
If you want to impress your audience with eye-popping slides, this book is for you.
If you want to break free from the Death By PowerPoint pandemic, this book is for you.
Nancy Duarte has written slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. (Learn more about Nancy Duarte in a Six Minutes interview!)
Ever since my copy arrived, I can’t put it down. I’ve carried it to and from work every day so that I can read a few pages on breaks. It’s that good.
I highly recommend slide:ology. It is destined to become a classic reference text for presentation skills.
Stephen Kosslyn has written a wonderful book for all presenters: Clear and to The Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations.
The subtitle for the book promises to illuminate the psychology of PowerPoint. Does it deliver?
In a way, yes. The 8 principles, dozens of examples, and hundreds of tips reveal much that would improve your PowerPoint skills.
However, this book delivers so much more. The 8 psychological principles can be applied to many aspects of public speaking beyond PowerPoint design.
Are you still annoying your audience with boring slide after boring slide?
Break free from PowerPoint bullets!
Learn from photojournalists — tell stories with visuals, and your audience will love you.
Presentation Zen book reviews, to be more accurate. Lots of them.
In the spirit of Rotten Tomatoes – a site I always check before buying or renting a movie – this article gathers book reviews from public speaking experts and fellow bloggers.
A summary of their opinion is simple: buy this book and the slides in your next presentation will benefit.
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