How many of us have heard a presenter say:
“I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this slide.”
“We’re just going to give you a high-level overview of the information on this slide”
Or
“This isn’t a great slide, but what can you do?”
Plenty, it turns out.
My plea to you as you transition from vacation mode and embark on annual planning and conference season is to Honor the Slide. If you show or share a presentation slide, acknowledge, explain and give your audience time to absorb it. Rushing through slides makes you seem anxious (if not ill-prepared).
What makes a slide honorable?
It meets basic design principles. Text and images adhere to the grid, while font, color and branding are consistent throughout. Headlines appear at the same place on each slide so that you’re not making the audience dart around to follow from slide to slide.
It clarifies a concept rather than confuses it. Good design directs the eye towards what is most important. And can help the speaker translate concepts. It accelerates the viewer’s ability to recognize and understand a concept.Using diagrams to explain the relationship among concepts is an effective and efficient way to clarify progression, parts of a whole, or a hierarchy, for example. Design is not about decorating with icons, pictures or cartoons.
It means the same thing to everyone on your team. If there’s no agreement internally, people outside of your team or organization aren’t likely to get a consistent message either.
Putting honor into action.
As a team, decide what standards you want to hold your presentation slides to. Strive for simplicity. It might be a list of five “must haves” and five “not at any costs” rules. Much more than that feels like a cumbersome list of do’s and don’ts that remove any of the remaining joy out of slide production.
Energize your templates by creating slides with more design direction. Enlist a graphic designer to give you options on creating three options of Table of Contents, Executive Summary, or timeline slides. Your managers will just select the one they prefer and populate with content. This will keep managers from straying too far beyond safe creative commons and give them time to focus more on the messages and the exchange of ideas.
One final recommendation is to use fewer, but better designed slides. You don’t need a slide for every concept or thought. If you don’t have the time or design talent available to create a presentation where each slide meets your team’s standards for “honorable slides,” use less of them.
Pro tip: Transition in and out of black backgrounds when in-between messages. This is also an effective tactic when you want to make a really important point. The audience retrains their eyes on you, the speaker.
Presentation Delivery
As you might imagine, we have lots of opinions and experience in presentation delivery. A focusing point for presenting the slides in an honorable way is to take the time to let your audience absorb the slide.
Take pride in your presentation slides. Honor them.
