Slides Archive - This Moment Counts

Do you overprepare the wrong thing?

Most people spend 90% of their time designing slides and only 10% figuring out what they’re actually saying.

Flip that, and your talks will never be the same.

If I had a month to prepare a talk, I’d spend three weeks getting to the point – and only the last few days on slides, if at all.

Because once you know where it all leads to, the rest tends to take care of itself. After all, you know your stuff. The challenge isn’t to make it elaborate. The challenge is to make it clear.

Here’s another way to think about it:
If you had the choice between a talk with elaborate slides but a somewhat confusing message and another talk with a crystal clear message but no slides, which one would you rather listen to?

Me too.

When the message is clear, the rest isn’t hard. And that’s something you can control.

Here’s how I allocate my time (roughly):

70% – What’s the point?

What’s the shift? → How do they see the world before your talk? How will they see it after?
Why does it matter? → Why should they care right now? What’s at stake if they don’t?
How do you say it simply? → If I had only one sentence, what would it be? What do I want them to pass along?

20% – How do I make it stick?

Make it visual → Can they see what I’m saying? Can I find a story, contrast, or example that paints the picture?
Make it personal → Can they find themselves in what I’m saying? Do I speak to their struggles, fears, or ambitions?
Use rhythm and pause → Where do I slow down to let them embrace the idea? What words need space so they can connect the dots?

10% – How do I support it?

Do I even need slides? Or is a different prop better?
If yes, how can they reinforce the message rather than distract from my words?
Can I delegate the creation?

Most people present slides. The best speakers deliver a message.

Try this breakdown the next time you prepare a talk, and see how much more confidence you’ll have in your delivery.

Keep lighting the path!

Connection established

You spent hours perfecting your slides.
They look great. Here’s what matters more.

Slides might catch the eye.
But do they connect with your audience on an emotional level?

Hardly.

What pulls people in emotionally is when you as a speaker connect to them with a story that resonates strongly.

And yet …
… you don’t prepare a story, but slides.
… you don’t have a conversation, you make a preso.
… you don’t obsess over connection, but fonts.

Slides don’t create connection.
The most they usually do is take attention away from you as the speaker.

They limit connection. (When the audience should be focused on you and your story, they’re busy reading the screen.)

The only reason to use a slide is when they make your point way clearer than your words ever could. When the cost of losing connection is outweighed by the clarity it adds.

That’s not often the case.

The whole reason you’re gathering in a room (on- or offline) is that your presence adds something that slides never could.

Curious to hear your thoughts: How do you connect to an audience?

Keep lighting the path!

Connection failed

Why do most presentations fail to connect with the audience?

Because presentation = slides.
People mistake slides for the presentation.

But connection is between humans.

Slides don’t connect.
→ You do.

Keep lighting the path!

Do slides waste your time?

Think of the great presentations you’ve seen?
How many of them were great because of the slides?
And how many were great because of the story (and how the speaker told it)?

Personally, I don’t recall a single great talk that resonated thanks to the slides.

To be fair, great slides can amplify a great story.
But I’ve never seen them save a bad one.
In fact, beautiful slides have often sent me to sleep when the story was boring.

Compare this to the opposite:
A great story will survive bad slides.
A captivating speaker makes me forget the awful slides.

→ The crucial work is on the story.
If you find words that strongly resonate, that’s what sticks.
Slides are best thought of as an amplifier – not the presentation’s core.

What’s your experience with slides vs. story? (Hit reply, I would love to hear your anecdotes.)

Keep lighting the path!

PS: Plus, once you’ve nailed the story, it’s so much easier to create great slides that amplify the story (or have someone create them for you).

The PowerPoint fail

A simple reason why 90+ percent of all PowerPoint presentations are crap: The presenter thinks that PowerPoint exists to make the presenter’s life easier.

It doesn’t. It exists to make your audience’s life easier.

For example …

To make a point that’s quicker to see than to hear.
To make concrete what would remain abstract using words only.
To give depth to an argument that would be hard to follow using words only.
To illustrate subtleties that would be hard to spot using words only.
To visualize complexities that would be hard – sometimes even impossible – to visualize in our minds.

Or, in short: to make life easier for your audience.

There’s not much more to know about PowerPoint. It’s a tool to serve your audience. Everything else follows from here.

4 design principles that help you to layout your ideas visually

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

understanding why some designs look so much more pleasant than others
having a vocabulary to verbalise what you like and dislike
visualising things in an accessible way with a clear visual hierarchy
achieving more professional looking designs

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.

What’s the ideal number of slides for a presentation?

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.

Posts in Tag: Slides

Do you overprepare the wrong thing?

Connection established

Connection failed

Do slides waste your time?

The PowerPoint fail

4 design principles that help you to layout your ideas visually

What’s the ideal number of slides for a presentation?