There are 6 elements we should check when putting our visuals together. Review this checklist before you start building the slide deck and your presentation will be much more impactful and successful.
1. Make sure you are boss of the visuals and not the other way around
Often, the speaker is overshadowed by the visuals and everyone’s attention is directed toward the screen. We must remember that the screen has limited persuasion power compared to using our facial expressions. We can express disbelief, shock, bemusement, horror, joy, doubt, concentration, scepticism, engagement, hostility, agreement, happiness, etc. No screen can do that and we should be combining our words with our facial expression to really drive home the point we want to make.
We must make the visuals our servant and not allow them to become our master. You see a lot of presenters who are almost invisible, because they have yielded control to what is up on the screen. We should stand stage left to the screen because we read from left to right. We want the audience to be captured by our voice and facial expression and then they look at what is on the screen, rather than just looking at the screen and ignoring us.
If you find that the audience are not looking at you, just stop speaking. That pattern interrupt will draw them all back to your face to find out what is going on. We should also be using our eyes to look directly at members of the audience for six seconds and speak to them One-On-One. That technique has a powerful magnetic grip on our listeners. However, be careful, we can only hold that pressure for six seconds per person or it becomes too intrusive.
2. Tiny fonts are not useful
We have all seen it. The presenter puts up a slide and the font sizes are tiny. Just to rub insult into the wound, they sometimes say dumb things like “I know you cannot read this but….”. But what? Why on earth do we have to sit there and look at a screen that we cannot read?
The Golden Rule with any slide is that if the viewer cannot get the main point within two seconds, then the slide is too complicated. This is especially the case with fonts. Make sure the fonts are big enough to read easily and if there is a fear of not being able to get them to the right size, then that slide probably needs to be broken into two or more slides. This is usually the solution for most slide shows. Get the information on to more slides and then we can easily enlarge the detail on the slide to make it easier to read.
One way to check the sizes are correct during the production process is to print out the slide and place it on the floor in front of you when standing. If you cannot read the detail, then more work is needed to adjust the size so that you can read it at a distance.
3. Graphs, graphs and more graphs
Seeing six graphs on a screen is not uncommon in many presentations. The obvious problem with this idea is that the fonts and numbers are so small, it is impossible to read what is on the graph. In general, the Chart Golden Rule is one graph per slide. That allows us to make the graphs large enough to be easy to parse.
Bar charts are a great tool for comparisons. We can contrast results spread over one or two years. More than that and the bar charts become hard to read.
If we need to see a comparison over longer periods of time then line charts are the best for that. Again, we should probably cap things at three variable because once we get over that number it looks like spaghetti and you have trouble following what is going on.
Pie charts are good for comparing shares of something. Two pie charts are the limit in this regard, because after that it gets hard to see what is on the screen.
4. White space is good
A lot of presentations are trying to cram all the information on to one slide. The various contents are now competing for our attention. Leaving a lot of white space on the screen is an excellent way of highlighting key information and forcing the audience to concentrate on the one thing we want to emphasise. Putting up one number in large font or one word is very powerful. There is only one thing to look at and we can talk to that number and elaborate on why that number or word is significant.
5. Use one photo and attach some mystery
“A picture is worth a thousand words” is a great saying and very true. It really allows us to make our point. We could carry this to the extreme and put up lots of photos, but we are defeating our aim of getting our message across. We are splitting our audience’s attention too thinly.
If we can include people in the photo, then that is even more attractive as we love to see people’s faces compared to cityscapes or landscapes. We are drawn to look at people’s faces. Knowing that, we can find a photo which has that element and which will assist us to make our key point.
For example, if we were talking about the problem of homelessness in San Francisco we could put up some graphs tracing the development of the problem over time. We could also put up a photograph of the homeless and the latter will have a lot more impact than the graph. We can make the same point, but the power is totally different. Always think about where we can use photos to make our point.
We could put up a photo and label it to explain why this photo is important. An even better idea is to tease our audience and just put up a photo and that is all. The audience are looking at it wondering what it means and that ensures we have their 100% attention for when we explain the significance behind the photo.
6. Control the colour exuberance
Too much detail on a slide is bad because we make the audience work hard to understand what they are looking at. Once we introduce more than two colours on a slide, we have increased the degree of difficulty of comprehension substantially. Yes, a couple of colours can provide some contrast and relief from the boredom of just one colour throughout the presentation. We shouldn’t go crazy though and assume more is better. As with everything in the visual presentation world “less is more”. So we need to be careful with colour usage and not let it distract from our key message.
Most people don’t do a good job of their presentations. They spend most of their preparation time on the slide deck construction, rather than allowing important time for rehearsal. Use this checklist to make sure your slides are adding value to your talk. By avoiding these mistakes you can create the time needed for rehearsal and your talk will be all the better for it.
