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Slides that stick

Helping you design better PowerPoint presentations


I grew up next to a rail track and always wondered why friends who came over to play looked startled when a massive freight train would shake the house. Currently I live close to an airport and my guest are running to window to see whether that plane actually hit our building or not.I hardly notice anything. The brain - in a form of self defense - is filtering out the noise.The same is true in presentations. Endless bullet points, cliche language, we heard it so often that the audience is filtering things out. Speaking louder or using bright colors does not really help.

In the 1990s, when we were still relying on print documents at McKinsey, I would hold the deck against a strong light source to look through it to see whether repeating elements such as titles and page numbers were lined up properly. (Something like this cartoon machine)"Jumping titles" are the result of slightly misplaced items on a slide sequence: when you hit page down and scroll through a series of slides quickly you see the titles moving up, down, right, and left. How to prevent it?

  • Bullet points are bad for presentations, so use the opportunity if you can get away with just one brief sentence on a slide: resist the urge to put a bullet point in front of it, even if the Microsoft PowerPoint template really encourages you to do so. Bullets are only for lists of 2 or more sentences, (and lists of 2 or more sentences should be avoided if you can).


In the middle of the video, they show you how they did this. After you've seen that, you still don't get it.

"Low-hanging fruit" is a term that is over-used in corporate meeting rooms. Recently I used a nice giraffe image to create a tongue in cheek slide explaining that all the easy opportunities have been picked away. (Yes I now giraffes eat leaves and not fruit..). Image found on iStockPhoto.

I get this question a lot when designing presentations for technology startups: "Hey, can you embed our demo video into the presentation?" I almost always try to avoid this:

I think yes, but really tiny ones, in a color with a very low contrast with the background. Standard PowerPoint templates put huge page numbers, dates, and other graphical distractions on every page. It looks ugly, and having a visible counter running on your pages might make your audience wonder how many more numbers there are before the end.Why still put them on (in a very small font)?

Many presentations start with a summary page, and most of them are stuck in the middle.

Kaitlyn Cole of OnlineUniversities.com research a top ten of the world's best paid public speakers.Some of these amounts are pretty high, but hey, hiring a celebrity singer to your party will also cost you dear.

A nice diagram on the blog Information is Beautiful (original post). Something to take into account when picking your next color template. click the image for a larger picture.

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