Short answer: No.
Long answer: If it helps to make a stronger case than without slides, then go ahead, make slides. If not, don’t. Make it specific and repeat this question for every single slide you think about creating. Is your story stronger with that slide, then make it. If not, don’t.
Here are four principles that will help you become better at designing almost anything. They won’t magically turn you into a pro designer and they certainly don’t replace any formal education, but they take you a long way to
So here they are:
1. Proximity
Place things that relate to each other in close proximity, and vice versa. Obvious for pro/contra lists but not so obvious for more complex ideas. But if you start to look, you’ll find plenty of ways to use spatial proximity to give your information better structure.
2. Alignment
If there’s already an element on the page then try to align new elements to this. This might be left/right, center, or top/bottom aligned. In any case, what this does is provide order to chaos. It’s easier to read and looks way more professional.
3. Repetition
Things that are the same or mean the same should look the same. It’s an unnecessary source of confusion when product A is red on slide 3 and blue on slide 5. Unless there’s a good reason to add color or fonts, stick with what you already used. It greatly helps your reader to make sense of your designs.
4. Contrast
Things that are different should look different. And when I say different, I mean different. Don’t just make the font 1pt larger, make it significantly larger. This is particularly helpful to create a visual hierarchy. Make the most important visual element stand out and then direct the eye with a proper use of proximity and alignment towards other parts.
Here’s an easy to follow example of how these principles are put into practice. I’ve originally encountered them in Robin Williams’ classic “The Non-Designer’s Design Book”.
Also, these principles are very much in line with the posture of the lazy designer when you keep it simple. If your content makes sense, these principles will in many cases guide you to a pretty straightforward design of the content.
Martin Luther King didn’t need a slide at all. Dick Hardt used 50 slides – per minute! Both used the ideal number of slides – for the story they wanted to tell on that day to that audience.
Rather than with a number of slides it’s much more useful to start with a story and then add slides as we need them. A slide is needed when it allows us to communicate something better with that slide than without it. Sometimes, we need a lot of slides, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes a slide needs a lot of time to explain, sometimes it doesn’t.
In essence, the simple (though, admittedly, not necessarily easy) answer to the question about the ideal number of slides is this: You need as many slides as you need.
When you perfectly align to the expectations of your audiences, they will follow you wherever you go. Like in this beautiful example by Bobby McFerrin leading a crowd at the World Science Forum in 2009:
What expectations can you align to in your interactions with your audience?
How can you play with your audiences’ expectations to lead them to places they are ready to go but would never have gone themselves?
What might in our domain be the equivalent to the universal pentatonic “musical alphabet” that McFerrin used?
Also: How can you include joyful elements in your interactions with your audiences?
And so the graphics department makes a 3D version of the chart. Because 3D looks cool, you know. But the problem is that the cost for this kind of bang is clarity. And the currency is trust.
3D sounds cool and (sometimes) looks cool. But never does it increase clarity. Not a single time. Every single 3D chart is harder to read than its 2D equivalent (as long as we are talking about 2D data, of course).
In essence, there is only one reason why 3D effects in charting software exists. And that is to sell charting software. Software sells better when it has more features that sound cool. But just because a feature exists, doesn’t mean that you have to use it.
When you want a chart to have more bang, it’s much more useful to ask yourself what’s wrong with the data rather than with the visualisation. Real bang comes from relevance rather than appearance. The currency is still trust. Only this time the cost is work.
Several months into the pandemic, remote formats still have a firm grip on businesses and events. From online meetings to online conferences, we will be seeing each other mostly on screen for quite some time to come. The good news is that there are still a lot of low hanging fruits in that new world of speaking.
Although many speakers and businesses have levelled up their technical skills and adapted their talks to online formats, many still struggle to fully embrace the possibilities that online brings along. We still see a lot of talks transferred onto the video format rather unchanged.
It feels a lot like back in the days when television still largely looked like filmed theatre. Now is the time to change that. After all, Netflix and YouTube is always just a click away. So that’s the new competition.
And that’s why now is the time to look for creative ways to make your talks even more instructive and entertaining. To make use of technology that just isn’t feasible in an on-stage setting. Rather than to try to mimic a stage setting, the right thing to do is to embrace the fact that you’re not in the same room, anyway.
Give me a call to analyse what’s possible for you.
Still, the overwhelming majority of slides uses massive amounts of text in bullet point structure with the occasional clip art and overly detailed chart filled in.
While it might be easy for the presenter to create, it’s often the worst slide to support the presentation. It’s distracting and detracting. It ruins the impact of your presentation.
There’s a great little experiment to prove that: When you watch the news, have a random magazine lying in front of you and choose a random sentence of 10-15 words. It’ll take you 3-5 seconds to read. I bet that you will have lost the thread of thoughts in the news broadcast. Now, consider that the typical PowerPoint slide easily takes 30-60 seconds to read. During that time, the audience won’t follow the speaker because they are busy reading. Of course, they’ll try, anyway, which leads them to constantly switch context from reading to listening to reading to listening… And this is one of the reasons why enduring typical PowerPoint presentations does actually feel physically exhausting.
Finally, everyone in the audience can read faster than you can talk. They don’t need you to read the slide for them. If everything was on the slide it would be so much cheaper to just send a memo. The reason we all gather in a room (no matter if it’s online or offline) is because you are adding something that can’t be put on a slide. The reason the presentation takes place is you. If it weren’t for you we would all be better off doing other things. So embrace that and make it about you. Show your enthusiasm. Provide your perspective apart from the raw facts. Make it a story that captivates us rather than a bullet list of facts. Let us in to your unique take on the subject.
Als Harry Beck 1931 die erste schematische Karte der Londoner U-Bahn veröffentlichte, kam das einer Revolution gleich. Zugunsten der besseren Lesbarkeit verzichtete er auf geografische Korrektheit. Er zeichnete bewusst eine „falsche“ Karte, die aber leicht zu verstehen war. Falsch im Sinne der Geografie. Richtig im Sinne der Verständlichkeit.
In diesem kurzen Video erklärt Michael Bierut drei einfache Prinzipien, die Becks Lösung ermöglichten, und die ebenso nützlich in Präsentationssituationen sind:
Denn die müssen es verstehen. Also: Welche konkreten Bedürfnisse oder Probleme haben die Benutzer? Und wie können Sie Ihr Thema so darstellen, dass es möglichst gut auf genau diese Bedürfnisse eingeht.
Und nicht die allumfassende. So wie U-Bahn-Kunden sich nicht für die geografischen Details über der Erde interessieren, solange sie sich in einer Bahn unter der Erde befinden, ist es Ihren Zuhörern möglicherweise egal, sämtliche Details Ihrer Produktes zu kennen, so lange sie es z.B. nur anwenden und nicht nachbauen möchten.
Als Ingenieur zeichnete Beck die Karte so, wie man sonst einen Schaltkreis zeichnet: Er zeichnete ein Diagramm statt einer Karte. Welche Bilder, Methoden oder Metaphern aus anderen Bereichen helfen Ihnen, Ihre Ideen verständlicher zu präsentieren?
Man muss stark sein, um PowerPoint sinnvoll einzusetzen.
Denn PowerPoint verleitet dazu, weniger klar zu denken. Folien zu füllen. Erst einmal alles drauf zu schreiben, was einem einfällt. Zusammenzusuchen, was man schon aus anderen Vorträgen hat, bevor man verstanden hat, wer da vor einem sitzt, warum sie dort sitzt und was bei ihr hängen bleiben soll. Fülle statt Prägnanz.
PowerPoint verleitet dazu, die falschen Prioritäten zu setzen. Schriftarten zu suchen, Farben zu wählen, Diagramme zu zeichnen, Animationen zu gestalten, Folien zu verschieben, bevor Sie sich Gedanken über den roten Faden gemacht haben und wissen welche Folien dafür überhaupt die richtigen sind. „Sieht gut aus“ statt „ist interessant, relevant und spannend“.
Wenn Sie es zulassen, frisst PowerPoint die gesamte Vorbereitungszeit. Doch jede Sekunde, die Sie in PowerPoint verbringen und die nicht das unmittelbare Ziel hat, mit den Mitteln von PowerPoint Ihren Vortrag klarer oder einprägsamer zu machen, ist eine verschwendete Sekunde. Je früher Sie im Prozess mit PowerPoint beginnen, desto größer ist die Gefahr, dass Sie Zeit dabei verschwenden.
Aber: Wenn Sie stark genug sind, dem zu widerstehen. Wenn Sie erst die wichtigen Fragen beantworten, damit Sie genau wissen, was zu sagen ist und wie Sie es Ihren Zuhörern am besten vermitteln … Dann kann mit PowerPoint aus einer tollen Story eine großartige Präsentation entstehen.
Seien Sie stark!
Ja, das Letzte, an das Sie bei der Vortragsvorbereitung denken sollten.
Tolle Folien können gute Präsentationen zu großartigen Präsentationen machen – aber niemals retten sie eine schlechte. Also: Erst die Story, dann die Folien, die genau dazu passen (wenn Sie denn überhaupt welche brauchen).
