Make better slides, faster.
Most of us make slides daily, if not hourly. Slides bring people along on your work journey, making sure they value your problem and progress, and agree with your next steps.
Slides are used in those pivotal moments to influence leaders who make or break your project and career.
So, it’s surprising that many people write slides that frustrate and confuse, derail your talk track, and kill your moment to shine.
5 simple rules for great slides.
1. Make a title that says it all.
2. Plan the journey of the readers eyes.
3. Keep it simple.
4. Be able to say more than your slide.
5. Pay attention to symmetry.
1. Make a title that says it all.
This is the simplest and most impactful problem to solve. The title needs to tell the audience the entire story of the slide. Routinely I see titles like “Project X update”, “Why project X?”, “Results”. Titles like this are unhelpful to the reader. They force the reader to go into the body of the slide and start hunting for the point themselves – which causes them to get frustrated and means they are no longer listening to your talk track.
Management consultants advise that all titles must be “action statements”. So:
“Project X update” → “Project X is ahead of schedule”
“Why Project X” → “Project X will reduce our time to market”
“Results” → “Click-through rates increased 25%”
2. Plan the journey of your readers eyes.
Ever sat in a meeting and when a slide appears you see 3-4 things at once and you spend time figuring out what you should look at? This happens to me frequently. The best approach is to structure your slide – a simple set of bullet points presents no problem – just read down. But if you have tables and text and data then you need to organize those pieces of information and make the one you want the viewer to look at first stand out. Ideally the one that stands out should be on the left, because most of us read left to right.
What becomes powerful in your talk track is that you can tell people to start on the left at the item that stands out, then when you want to move them, you tell them where to look next and so on. It actually breaks your talk track into bite size chunks where both you and the audience are taking your queues from the structured sequence of the slide. It will make it easier for you to deliver the right message in the right order.
3. Be able to say more than your slide.
Experts say use a minimum of 18-point font, but most people can’t help adding dense text or big tables to slides. The goal is to make all text 18+ point and be ready to talk in 10 point or less. Never put all the information on the slide, otherwise you will find yourself reading from it, the ultimate impression killer. Using this very example – I could write “Be able to say more than your slide” as my bullet point and then speak to the paragraph!
Some of the best presentations I have seen have 1 statement and 1 image per slide. Whilst that won’t work for a management review – it reinforces the point that in communication less is often more.
4. Pay attention to symmetry.
Humans love symmetry and are often derailed by a lack of it in slides. And this is true of the small things and the big things, from matching fonts and aligning text edges to centering images and text. Lack of symmetry distracts viewers from your message and, at worst, communicates sloppiness.
The first thing an ex-McKinsey & Co. coworker taught me was to update my quick access toolbar on Powerpoint.
Powerpoint® quick access toolbar with key icons.
You should add all the major alignment tools, group and ungroup and get used to using them – they help you quickly get everything in a beautiful symmetric structure.
Alongside this make sure all your fonts are the same, and that you use the same font sizes for similar items.
Later, learn how to fix varied formats and spacings within text and table boxes. They make even aligned items look offset. Future blog…
5. Keep it simple.
Keep it simple is about both the message and the content. Be a great editor and look for things to eliminate. Some of the more obvious content traps are:
· Things coming along for the ride: e.g., if you only need part of a data set or text description, only use that. Don’t grey out or reduce the rest, delete it or put it in an appendix.
· Repeated items: if you describe the same attribute twice, group it.
· Unnecessary words: E.g., be careful of adverbs. Strong works better than very strong, different works better than remarkably different etc. It uses less space and removes subjectivity.
