Make your message stronger with better slides

This is one of the most important lessons I have learned. It has helped me to communicate exactly what I want and ensure the message is heard. Now I'm showing you these easy rules to make good slides.

Hello, Hypers!

The following is a summary of some lessons I received from my mentor on how to craft engaging slides. It could seem not too important, but the core ideas in these lessons have helped me to be heard by the people I wanted to talk to. The most effective way to open doors is through communication, and these are the basics of effective communication.

There is this widespread misconception of thinking that people are interested in what we are talking about. A presentation is, first of all, a fight to get the total attention of the audience. In this post, I will focus on improving your slides' quality by giving you some tips. Maybe I will write something about other aspects of presentations in another post.

So, let's get started!

1: Your slides can’t contain all the info

As a rule of thumb, if someone can read your slides and get all the info, then you're doing it wrong. Your info must be split among the slides and the discourse. If one of them is missing, then a part of the info is missing too.

That's because your slides need to deliver information in a way that makes your discourse lighter and easier to understand for the audience (who doesn't care about you).

2: Always add a title

No matter what is shown in that specific slide, you need to add a title to it.

If people get distracted at some point in your presentation and try to return and understand your explanation, it would be better that they could see what are you talking about right now. That's the main purpose of the slide title.

Hence, you need your titles to be concise, and you need them to tell the audience what you are talking about right now. For example, "Prerequisites", "Problem definition", "State of the art", etc.

3: Minimize text, maximize images and graphs

Here’s one I often neglect in this newsletter. Don’t be lazy like me.

If you want to explain an algorithm, do it by using animations and images. If you want to explain a process that has many stages, use illustrations for every stage. Your audience will appreciate that.

You know what they say: A picture is worth a thousand words. People don't want to read, they don't even want to understand you! You need to make your message important and interesting to them. And you definitely want your message to be as easy to digest as possible.

4: Keep moving

More than 10-15 seconds without any change in your slide... Boom!!! Half of the room is sleeping and the other half is on social media. Yes, your family too.

That doesn't mean you need to move from one slide to another with that frequency, just make something appear or disappear, or some animation perhaps, but keep moving. Maintain the audience engaged.

5: The 7 rule

When including text just write up to 7 lines per slide and up to 7 words per line.

Try not to exceed those limits, but you can exceed them by one or two words/lines in some special cases.

Adding too much text is bad for many reasons. We have stated earlier that people don't want to read, we (as the audience) prefer other smoother channels. But another drawback related to adding too much text is explained in the next tip.

6: Don't show all the text at once

People don't want to read, but if you put some text in your slide they prefer to read it instead of paying attention to your discourse.

If you want people to keep listening to you, show the text with the info that you are talking about right now. After that, show the next line about the next topic, and so on.

When people in the audience read a lot of text from the slide, they get lost when returning to your speech. They read much faster than you speak. Just apply the brake.

7: Maintain a table of contents

Just for larger presentations

Your ideas are arranged in some order in your head. Transmit that order to your audience explicitly. Before and after talking about some topic, show your Table of Contents.

Make sure to highlight the next topic you will be talking about and differentiate the topics you have already explained. Use different colors and opacities maybe.

8: End your presentation with the first slide

You did it quite well! You managed to catch the attention of the audience during the presentation. They are amazed and wondering how can they reach you. Maybe an email or some social media links? Nop, all they can see is a "Thank you", that is what your last slide says.

Always end your presentation with your very first slide, which contains your name, the title of your presentation, and your contact info.

Important note

A presentation is not a bunch of slides. A presentation is a conception, a method you elaborate to transmit your ideas and results. The answer to the question "Have you finished your presentation?" can be "Yes, I just have to finish my slides".

But slides can make the difference between a great and a poor presentation. When used in the right way, they can be a very effective weapon, but they also can make your presentation a total disaster if you use them badly.

Conclusions

I have given you some tips to make your slides an effective weapon.

Remember to approach your presentation as a fight to get the attention of your audience. With that in mind, try to make your message easy to digest, and add dynamism to your slides. That's the way to keep people engaged.

Let me know if you enjoyed this post by reacting. Feel free to reply with any extra suggestion that works for your slides. This is all for this week, let’s meet again next Tuesday!

See you!