Clean Slides Are a Must When Presenting Online
The slide below likely looks familiar. Maybe not the content, but the look. While what you see above is a beautiful photo that has no apparent connection to the topic of this blog post, what you see below is busy, lacks beauty, and features the text from another source cut and pasted into a slide. There is a message, but in its present form, it’s like an overgrown shrub (now you see why we picked the photo at the beginning of this post). In its present form, it looks ugly and unkept. The message will be lost on the audience.
We can do better. The executives we interviewed for our book, Captovation: Online Presentations by Design, consistently reinforced the importance of crisp, clean, and easily understandable slides. Scott teaches with a colleague who coaches people to think of each slide as a billboard. Billboards often feature a strong image and one central message that is quickly understood. This is an illustrative and impactful metaphor—and while we acknowledge that this advice is not relevant in some instances, in most cases, it’s a good rule of thumb. Another way to think about your slides is as notecards that may have crisp and powerful images. While most people don’t realize it, slide design is critical to your success. Some slides are easy to navigate (below) and some are difficult to deliver (above).
Check out our quickly re-imagined slide below. Scott used this when presenting to a law firm a few months back. He summarized the text and added a quick image from www.thenounproject.com.
Most people we encounter cut and paste text onto a slide, add some random images, and are done with it. Don’t be that individual. Work to provide your audience with clean slides that help your message live in heart and mind. They will have a better idea of what you them to learn, feel, or do.
Source: Luzardo, G., Guamán, B., Chiluiza, K., Castells, J., & Ochoa, X. (2014, November). Estimation of presentation skills based on slides and audio features. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM workshop on multimodal learning analytics workshop and grand challenge, 41.
We explore this topic and others in our book Captovation: Online Presentations by Design.