Key Strategies
The Bottom Line: Effective Presentation Slides Reinforce Your Message
This quick guide to effective slides covers preparation, speaking notes, text design, visual design, animations, and slide transitions.
Preparation
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Decide Whether or Not You Need a Slide Deck
Don’t have time to put together a well-designed and visual slide deck? Create a handout with a brief outline of your talk with space for listeners to take notes. There’s no law that says that every type of talk must have slides to accompany it.
Create the Content First
Resist the urge to play with presentation software before you have thoroughly read your sources and developed your outline.
Use Speaking Notes
Many presenters put their speaking notes on their slides, which results in an awkward presentation where the presenter turns away from the audience and reads their own slides. Create speaking notes to keep in front of you and avoid looking at your slides.
Tips for speaking notes
Keep them brief and print in a large (18-22 point) font. These should be an outline of your key points, rather than the full text of your speech. Alternately, print your slidedeck in Handout format (vertical, 4 per page is index card size) and tape copies of your slides to index cards, marking your animations for reference.
If you have to present without notes, use your speaking notes to practice until you don’t need them anymore.
Slide Text
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Use a Headline and Minimal Text
A headline helps audiences keep track of your main points, but no one can read and listen at the same time, so there’s no reason to put more than a few words on any one slide. It is often appropriate to avoid text altogether and create purely visual slides.
Select Sans Serif Fonts
Sans serif fonts don’t use serifs, the lines, strokes, or projections that attach to the main stroke lines that form letters in typography. Sans serif fonts create improved readability on a screen or slide. Common sans serif fonts include Adobe Clean, Ariel, Calibri, Century Gothic, Helvetica, and Roboto.
Use Brief Bullet Points and Keep Bulleted Lists Short
Bullet points longer than three-five words and lists with more than three-five items distract audiences from what you’re saying. However, an image is often a better choice than a bulleted list.
Make Lists Parallel
Each item in a numbered or bulleted list should begin with the same type of word to help audiences quickly understand your points. See examples below.
Parallel List Beginning with a Verb
Third Quarter Goals
- Increase sales by 20%
- Roll out two new product lines
- Hire one sales professional
Parallel List Beginning with a Noun
Common Investment Products
- Stocks
- Bonds
- Derivatives
Parallel List Beginning with a Modifier
Popular Items from the 2019 Collection
- Cashmere sweaters
- Skinny high-rise jeans
- Floral sneakers
- Chunky scarves
Proofread
Read every word out loud and ask a trusted friend or colleague to check your slides for embarrassing errors. Pro Tip: many spell check programs don’t highlight mistakes if the text is in all caps.
Visual Design: Templates, Images, Graphs, and Other Visuals
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Customize Slide Templates
Audiences have seen the most commonly used PowerPoint or Google Slide templates before, in contexts unrelated to what you have to say. Customize fonts and colors and other design elements to create a unique template.
Check For Accessibility
Use WebAIM’s color contrast checker to evaluate the accessibility of your chosen color combinations.
Add Thoughtful Visuals That Support Everything You Say
Brainstorm a way to illustrate all of your main ideas and supporting details.
Avoid Random Clip Art, Stock Photos or Watermarked Images
Low quality images distract from your message.
Size Visuals Appropriately
There’s no reason to put three graphs on one slide; create a new slide for each graph, with a headline that clearly states what the graph shows. Additionally, look for images that are appropriately sized. More pixels = better quality—click Tools/Size in Google image search to return only large images. Small images that you enlarge will look blurry on the screen.
Animations & Transitions
Animate list items or images
Focus audiences on what you want them to look at by only showing them one thing at a time. YouTube and LinkedIn offer many tutorials on using animation tools.
Incorporate slide transitions
Slide transitions can create an additional layer of visual interest. Use one or two subtle transitions consistently rather than a different transition for each slide. Consider the “personality” of the transition and whether or not it fits the tone of your presentation.