Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Two
Here we are back with Part Two of the exciting journey into how to use visuals when presenting. Given how straight forward this is, you wonder how come so many people make a mess of it? Let’s keep going with some guidelines to help us stand out in the crowd, as the special few, who are professional and know what they are doing.
Bar graphs are great. They make it visually easy to compare items. For certain, heavy numbers focused presentations, you want to compare different variables using bars.
Line charts are also clear, quick to understand and show change over time. When you want to compare two or three items over time, it is very easy to see this one is up and that one is down, these are flat. Try to avoid more than three lines though, because it gets very confusing very quickly. Simplicity rules when dealing with numbers.
Pie charts are also fantastic for showing the parts of a whole. What is the share of something? As long as there’s not too many slivers, then a pie chart works well. When you have too many slices of the pie, it gets very hard to fathom the relativities between items. For that task bar charts or line graphs are better.
People still manage to get this wrong. The real key is to only show one big graph per slide, if possible or two graphs, if a comparison is needed. As soon as we put up more information on the slide than that, the information becomes very small and the mind is assaulted by too much data at one time. Keep it minimalist and clear.
With lighting, be very careful when the room gets set up. Get there early is the rule. Honestly, I am yet to meet any people who set up the rooms, who also do presenting themselves. They are just told by their boss, “You set up the room. Put the chairs here. Put the lectern there. Put the mic there”. Particularly at hotels, I notice that a lot of times hotel staff, very unhelpfully, will turn off all the lights in the room. The whole stage area is black and the screen is the main light source. No, no, no.
You want the lights on that audience. You want to see your audience. You want to be looking at their faces. What is their reaction to what I am saying? Am I boring them? Are they with me? Are they nodding? Are they shaking their head? Are they distracted, looking at their phones? You must see your audience.
So keep the room lights up on the audience. Do not let anyone turn it down. If they do, then stop immediately and request they put them back on again. If you have to turn it down at all, turn it down very, very little. Try and keep the room lit. Around the screen area itself, it’s good if you can actually have the lights off just above the screen. Then the screen becomes easier to read. But definitely leave the lights on you. When they shut the lights down, you are now in darkness, so you are invisible to an audience. Just a minor voice in the dark. No, have the lights on you, spotlights on you, so the audience can see your face. Your face has got so much power of persuasion. You can add so much more credibility to the message, through using your face, your gestures, your body language. Don’t miss the opportunity, make sure that the audience can see all of that.
I am struggling to think of too many venues that manage to isolate out the lights above a screen. But today with most projectors, the screens are pretty good, even with all the lights on, so it’s usually not such a big deal. And again, if you design your visuals with that in mind, you’re not going to be too dependent on too much information on the screen. When we have a particularly bright room, there might be a lot of natural light. Then often you have a slide with light background with very dark text as the contrast. That works very well. So the contrast of dark fonts on a light background in a light room can work. Or sometimes in a dark room you might go the other way and have a dark background with white and even white bolded text on a screen to really stand out and have the contrast.
Colors on screen are tricky. You rarely see people using them well. Colors like black, blue, green work very well on a screen. They are the best colors. Stay away from orange, grey and particularly red. Black and blue work together well as a contrast. Green and black also work well together as a contrast. They’re good colors to mix and match on the screen: black and blue, green and black. Red can be hard to see. In fact, I was at a presentation not that long ago on marketing. Quite good content and reasonably well delivered, but the screen! Dark blue background, red on dark blue. No one could read it very easily. So avoid red. It is hard to read on a screen.
Also don’t go crazy and try and have some sort of rainbow federation going on. Putting all the colors up there. It is too distracting and too confusing. Remember, you are the message. You. Your face, your body, your gestures, your body language, your energy. You are the message, not what is on that screen. The screen must be a slave to you. It is a servant to you. Not the other way around.
So when we are preparing, one of the tricky things is we often sit around in front of a screen. We are at a very close distance when we are preparing the visuals. Then off we go to give the presentation and we are in a big room, a big venue, with a big screen. And somehow it doesn’t look like it did when you was preparing it. And you go, “uh oh”. Usually that is too late. When you were preparing your computer has a presentation mode function. Go to that and then run your slides through that and see how it looks.
We will continue to go deep with this topic in Part Three next week.
