Notes from 53rd International STC Conference
Las Vegas, Nevada, May 7-10, 2006

Effective Slides: Design, Construction, and Use

Jean-luc Doumont

The presenter is an independent contractor (JL Consulting) specializing in electronic publishing.

Session Description: The presenter's thesis was that most slides are ineffective: rather than enhance the materials presented, they detract from what the speaker is saying. The presentation explored the design, construction, and use of effective slides.

Real-time critiques of slides from STC conference

• Examined "random" slides illustrating some problems (pulled them from the STC conference site). The spirit is not to judge, but to learn... so it's all right to be overcritical.
   
• We're criticizing slides, not the speakers.
• The slides may not look as intended.
• Slide 1: Resources slide: A bullet list of 3 detailed bibliography entries. Criticism: dense text, possible readability issues. The problem is that humans cannot process two streams of text data (one on the screen, one aural, from the speaker) simultaneously. Too many words on the slide compete with the speaker for the audience's attention.
• Concept 1: Slides are optional. Do them right or not at all. Bad slides detract, so they are worse than nothing at all.
• Slide 2: 4 bullets with dense text and tight leading. Same issues as the bibliography slide. PowerPoint "decoration" art on template distracts.
• Slide 3: 1 bullet under 1 bullet, followed by about 12 lines of unbroken text. Footer is black on dark blue.
• Concept 2: Role of bullets is to delineate a list.
• Concept 3: Don't read slides. If that's all you're gong to contribute, hand out hard copies and leave.
• Concept 4: Trying to make the slides double as a stand-alone detailed handout is not effective; those are two different media demanding greatly different levels of detail, especially on text. Better to create a separate handout designed specifically as a written document, and to create slides that are optimized for visual aids.
• Concept 5: Footers. Minimize information in them. Don't use Slide 1 of N footers... especially if you have a lot of slides.
• Slide 4: Identifying Revenue-Generating Opportunities: 3 levels of bullets, with copious detail at the third level... and just 1 bullet at the top level, which is never a good format... simply eliminate that bullet and convert it to a 2-level structure. Again, way too much text. Yellow border also detracts ("noise"), pulling attention away from the speaker.
• Slide 5: Using Translation Memory. 4 bullets, dense text, tight leading. One example is indented but not separated from the others by space. Bullets themselves are distracting.
• Concept 6: How many lines of text per bullet are too many? 2 is max; 1 is better.
• Slide 6: Lessons Learned. Each bullet has 1 or 2 lines, but there are way too many of them (7), reducing type size to an unacceptable level... yet all bold, which further reduces legibility. Watermark behind text reduces readability. Also, the slide was introduced with a garish and gratuitous special effect (noise).
• Slide 7: Gap Analysis. 3 bullets, not as much but still more than desirable (4 lines in third bullet). Also, all 43 slides are all bold type, which is tiring for the viewer (less legible). Also, it is not a legitimate list; it's a Q-A and comment, which should not be bulletized as 3 comparable items.
• Slide 8: P&P Defined. Appears to be picked up directly from a document. 7 lines of text with tight leading. Underlining of imbedded title clips letters' tails, reducing legibility.
• Slide 9: Why Open Source? A second frame within the .ppt image area with a background color simply wastes some real estate and contributes nothing.
• Slide 10: Nine quality characteristics, in 3 groups of 3. Text is much shorter, but that puts all the text on the left side of the slide (looks imbalanced).
• Slide 11: Microscopic text.
• Slide 12: Begin with a Definition. Shadowing makes title fuzzy, way too much data with 5 sub-bullets listing bibliography information
• Slide 13: What is Conflict? All caps, white on red... very harsh; grates on eyes.
• Slide 14: Getting Yourself Hired. Strange 3D effect in title is difficult to read.
• Slide 15: Results of Chapter Fund-Raiser. 4 logos are 4 too many. Don't put them on every slide. Too many elements competing for attention. Too many different colors of type.
• Slide 15: The Manager. Horrible clip art, and a male no less (gender issue). Title is way too big. Faulty parallelism in wording of bullet items.
• Slide 16: Users Like Demos. 4 bullets, minimal text, but still small type. Light blue on white for title does not jump. Clip art lower right is garish.
• Concept 7: Color of type on laptop is not the same as the color will be when projected on the screen. Test charts with actual delivery device.
• Slide 17: Business Drivers for XML Adoption. Colorful (3 graphics: 2 to right, 1 to left, but no reason for the placement, other than staggering next to text). Title is white out of busy light and dark green background; poor readability. Bullets are too close to text. Several widows on sub-bullets; could have reduced number of lines with some judicious editing.
• Slide 18: Data Preference Collection. Simple Left-Middle-Right with 3 graphics and titles underneath. It's a mix of clip art, a photo, and a drawing (three different graphic styles), which looks tacky. I-caps of all words in titles or bullets is not a good idea; it can create confusion... better to use down style.
• Slide 19: Why Use Storyboards? Best one so far. One color, nice blend with graphics. Unnecessary framing. Question mark is overly fancy type... had to read.
• Slide 20. Facilitation Experiment. Two graphics. Obviously cut-and-pasted from Excel, with illegible callouts.
• Slide 21: Survey results: One large bar chart. Bars are visible, but callouts are still way too small. Too colors within title: why?
• Concept 8: Bar charts tend to work better horizontally than vertically.
• Slide 22. Schematic. Different borders without clear definition of what they mean. What does shading mean? Light green title on white background does not jump. Type inside blocks is too small.
• Concept 9: White boxes popping out of a dark blue background tend to work better than color-shaded boxes against a white background.
• Slide 23: The Ethics of Disabilities: Agenda. 10 items is way too many for audience to absorb
• Slide 24: Agenda. 7 items. Still too many.
• Slide 25. SAKSON & TAYLOR. Company name overpowers the title of the presentation.
• Slide 26: Title slide. Again, corporate name overwhelms title.
• Slides 27, 28: Art on title slides is not clearly connected to topic.
• Slide 29: Facilitating meetings for Optimum Effectiveness. Art is hard to process.

Design principles

• Effective presentations
   
• Planning
• Designing
• Creating slides
• Delivering
• Answering questions
• One message, one slide. One message only per slide. One slide for each message.
• Use effective redundancy. Show stand-alone slides. Speak a stand-alone text message. This also helps those in the audience with visual or hearing limitations.
• Test readability of slides by printing them 6-up in black-and-white.
• Rehearse your presentation several times, at least once without the slides. The tendency is to have slide-driven presentations, where the slides are more for the speaker than they are for the audience. Visual aids should be just that — aids. Overdependence on slides also reduces eye contact with the audience.
• Tables should be simple.
• Pie charts must have imbedded ID, not a separate legend... there must be a close tie with what the segments represent; otherwise the audience will not make the connection. No reason for a 3D pie chart just to do it... the depth shadow looks like a different color, which confuses the operation.
• Deliver the message of the chart in the title; make the graphic reinforce the message.
• Do more with less: Not what could I further add, but what could I further suppress? Simplify.
• For effective slides, remember:
   
• Do slides right, or not at all. Plan, design, rehearse.
• State a message, develop it visually. Make the slides redundant and stand-alone.
• Be concise, verbally and visually. And sometimes add, but more often, take away.