If you search for tips on improving slide decks and presentations, you usually find the same sort of tips. Keep it short. Keep it uncluttered. Stick with a palette from the company/software/package. Have your notes ready, know your deck cold, be able to do without it.
Very few seem to focus on a couple of problems I see over and over again, and I thought I’d try to address them here.
Lose the pastels. Light, bright colors that are in the same range are rather useless on screen. They print great in your color hand outs, they look nice on your screen, but across the room, they won’t show up well. And as a black and white print out, they’ll be useless shades of grey.
Don’t assume your audience has 100% color vision. A number of colleagues, including a few at recent classes and seminars, are color blind in some way. Use more than color to show your varied items: numbers, letters, arrows, or other keying information. Not sure how your colors look? Try this tool I found while searching for the answer to another client problem. (I’ve spoken to the creator about making it a more user-friendly tool – stay tuned.)
Double, even triple decking. Yes, it can be a lot of work – especially if you’re making changes up until the last minute. But you likely need to have more than one set of slides for your presentation.
One black and white set that will photocopy and distribute well.
One dark-room deck, usually with a white background.
One reversed deck a dark background with white text. One set of classes I took had lovely west facing windows along one side of the room, with no blinds. Morning classes were difficult, afternoon classes were blindingly painful. Other multi-purpose rooms and hey-let’s-make-it-a-lecture room rooms don’t have dimming capabilities, and you’re faced with a choice: complete dark or complete bright. Not ideal if your audience needs to take notes and weren’t prepared for a dark room.
Parallelism. Don’t make your audience remember. They can’t think that far back to twelve slides ago when you showed them Brand X and your wonderful idea. Show a before and after. Yes, it means duplication of slides in your deck because you can’t program a deck to show alternative threads, but seeing comparisons side by side is a powerful tool.
Repeat the question. Whether you’re live, recording, in a small group or large, repeat the question. This ensures you understand the question, the questioner knows you understand it, and that embarrassed guy in the back who had to silence ABBA right in the middle of Dancing Queen gets the question, as well.
Record yourself. Do this for yourself, with a test audience, and, if it won’t interfere with the final presentation, during the final presentation. Some times, despite the best efforts of a part-time cobbled-together A/V system, some of the information on the video will be dropped on the audio. Use these to remove uhs, uhms, and buts, or to capture questions from the test audiences to incorporate into later drafts. Or to provide transcripts (value-add!) to your presentation clients. Don’t record yourself using the presentation laptop – unless you’ve tested it to ensure you’re not overloading your system.
Most of the lectures, classes, and seminars I’ve attended lately were stellar. Great information, well laid out, but with a few problems beyond and within their control. It’s not just about giving information people can use, it’s about giving it in a usable, relatable, retainable format.
Happy presenting!
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