Design principles

3 techniques for putting less text on your slides

October 18, 2021 by Ellen Finkelstein 1 Comment

You probably know that creating slides with lots of text on them is a sure sign of “Death by PowerPoint.”

Even if your content is valuable and interesting, the text makes it LOOK boring.

Also, research has shown that images attract more attention.

So the solution is almost always to replace text with images and not put everything you say on the slide.

How do you present without the text?

Presenting without the text on the slides can get some people nervous. Presenting without the text means you have to do one or more of the following:

Use Presenter view to see your notes (put what you’ll say in the Notes pane in PowerPoint)
Use written notes or cards
Practice so you know what you’ll say without seeing the text on the slide

Here are 3 ways you can get most of that text off the slide… [Read more…]

Presenting remotely: Avoid the 8 deadly sins of webinars

March 30, 2020 by Ellen Finkelstein 9 Comments

Note: I originally wrote this in 2013 but I’m updating this during the Coronavirus pandemic because more people are presenting online now.

Webinars are a powerful way to communicate from afar. They have opened up many possibilities for marketing, meetings, and training. But only if you do webinars right.

If you simply show slides with the text that you’re reading, this is what happens:

Your audience scans the text quickly
They then turn their attention to you speaking, but you’re saying the same thing they’ve just read (because people can read the slide much faster than you can speak it out)
So they start multi-tasking — checking their email, checking out other web pages, doing other work, etc.

Well, isn’t that what you do when you watch a webinar like that?

But you can do better. Here are the 8 deadly sins that kill the effectiveness of your webinars and how to avoid them. [Read more…]

Think BIG to create high-impact presentations

November 3, 2019 by Ellen Finkelstein 2 Comments

You want your presentations to have an impact on your audience — change them, move them to action, inspire them.

One way to do this is to think BIG, both in terms of your concepts and your visuals.

Big ideas help to inspire people. Plus, the brain learns more easily when new knowledge is connected to existing knowledge.

How to think big in terms of ideas

In terms of ideas, connect:

The local to the universal
The present to the past and the future
Facts and data to general principles

People are not inspired by facts and figures, but by the concepts they reflect.

How to portray big concepts visually

In all cases, visuals should reflect the ideas you’re trying to get across. You can increase the power of your ideas with images that are big, inspiring, and powerful. Big visuals are big both in their content and their size.

The slide at the top of this post and the one just below are two examples. Why the slide at the top shows the concept of bigness is obvious–it shows the galaxy. That’s pretty big!

But the slide below is different. It uses a metaphor to show a child on a road that obviously refers to a person looking at his or her future. In other words, “Where are you going?” sounds like it could be about going to the store, but it’s really much bigger than that and the image portrays the big/small duality of the concept.

When you make an image big in size, you often have to adjust the text around the image, rather than the usual practice of fitting the image around the text.

Here are a couple of examples…

In each case, the image covers the entire slide and the text has been moved about to accommodate the image. The image is front and center. When you create slides like this, they will almost always have a high impact on your audience.

How could you use BIGNESS in your presentations? Leave a comment and please use the buttons below to share this with others who would benefit.

It’s about the audience

September 20, 2019 by Ellen Finkelstein 1 Comment

You’re always presenting for your audience. Your presentation shouldn’t be about you.

What type of presentation will give your audience the most value?

Ask yourself…

What do they need and want?

Your content needs to be relevant to the needs and wants of your audience. Sometimes that’s hard to know but if you can survey them in advance or do some research, you’ll be more on track.

Sometimes, you’ll prepare a presentation and discover during it that you are going in the wrong direction. If possible, change tack and adjust.

What will help them understand and remember the content?

[Read more…]

The flipped presentation: A different way to present and create handouts

June 22, 2019 by Ellen Finkelstein 2 Comments

Let’s say that you’re giving a presentation that requires you to provide a lot of detailed information to your audience. Perhaps you’re

Training supervisors about vacation, sick day, and leave of absence policies
Doing a project update that requires you to explain the data you collected during your research
Providing employees with a list of outside services they can use when they need to communicate with hearing-impaired, vision-impaired or non-English speaking customers.

The detailed information is what you need to impart. It’s true that many presenters put in detailed information that isn’t really necessary, but let’s assume that it’s absolutely necessary for your situation. Many presentations are technical, data-based, or complex. Even a sales presentation might require that you provide prospective customers with detailed specs about your product.

So, you create slide after slide with lists of facts and data.

STOP!

[Read more…]