Keeping with the idea of space, not only should we be aware of the amount of space in which we are working, but we should also understand the importance of white space (also referred to as negative space). Simply, negative space is any portion of your slide that is empty of content or graphics. It's blank.

There's a trend in the media, it seems, to pack as much information into every square inch of visible medium as possible. Whether you are talking about print, packaging, or television, the result is the same – a deluge of information and graphics for the viewer to receive and process.

This philosophy also seems to influence slide design, hence results like these:


slides from the Hillary Clinton campaign and Intel respectively

In all honesty, the Clinton campaign's slide is tame compared to its neighbor, but both of these slides suffer from cramming too much information to digest all at once. I don't even understand the Intel slide enough to make a crack at it, but here's my attempt at cleaning up the Clinton slide.



This slide is talking about districts that Bush won in the last general election and who have traditionally supported Republican seats in congress. It's a big deal, but it's also easy to lose sight of on a cluttered slide – especially since someone felt the need to list each specified district. This alternative slide pulls out much of the visual distraction and focuses on the single most important fact: the victories.

Give your information room to breath, and make sure the most important element is the focus of your slide. Don't let the urge to fill every inch of available space crowd out the real message. Oh, and there's one more small reason to avoid this kind of clutter: the more time your audience is deciphering your slides, the less they are paying attention to what you are saying!

Tags: text, graphics, clutter, design

Have you seen any of Hewlett-Packard's recent print or web advertisements? These have been around for a while, but I hadn't really paid too much attention to them until two things happened: we got new HP's at work, and I received one of their catalogues in the mail.

In both cases, I kept getting distracted by their font selection. Here are a couple shots of their web ads to illustrate:

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Why do I feel a sudden urge to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas?

We're in the heat of summer, and this whole campaign looks like Halloween. Even the colors reinforce that feeling. I don't know what feel they intended for this marketing, but "slightly creepy" was probably not the goal. ("They're creepy and they're cooky, the HP family...")

Font and color use contribute to the overall feel of your work – even in slide presentations. Sometimes, going with a default font is okay, but in other instances, you may want to pick and choose between fonts for the best results. I whipped these alternatives up in just a couple of minutes in Keynote, so they're far from perfect. However, I think they offer an alternate feel to the ads. (I'm partial to the laptop example, personally.)

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How would you change these ads, or do you think they're fine how they are? Remember, if you are using visuals to communicate a message, every element is important, and this includes the font you choose. The wrong font can send your audience a mixed message, so take some time to browse those many fonts available on your computer.

Tags: font use, text, colors, examples

Right now, a set of bad PowerPoint slides is probably the least of Governor Romney's public relations worries, but every little bit helps I guess. Anyway, revising slides is a good practice, so, regardless of how you or I might personally feel about Governor Romney, let's take a look at some slides on his site and how we can improve them just a little. (Quick note: I'm checking all political opinions at the door for this post, and I ask you the courtesy to do the same. This is merely an academic exercise on improving some common PowerPoint mistakes.)

From the first slide, it's possible to predict some of the issues we're going to run into while going through Mr. Romney's visuals. Too much text is on the slide. The planet graphic is obviously clip art, and overall, the slide is pretty hard on the eyes.

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Even though the title slide is unnecessary in and of itself, using it sets a tone for the entire presentation. You want it to look nice. In this alteration, most of the text has been cut from the slide, focusing on two words: "values" and "freedom." I retained the global theme but used a higher quality image from Corbis. Also, I used a color scheme that suggests patriotism and bipartisan qualities. The text is a very classic-looking font called Cochin.

I had a hard time deciding what to do with the next slide (only partially because I couldn't read some of the text at all), but I think it would be appropriate to divide this single slide into multiple slides – taking a thematic approach rather than chronological.

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A strong theme that I took away from this slide is Romney's desire to discredit Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I retained the color scheme from the first slide and faded a common media image of Ahmadinejad into the background, focusing on one quote in particular. The presenter could keep this background intact while transitioning between facts and quotes rather than cramming tons of tiny text together. Font sizes on my version of this slide are 64 points and 96 points.

The final slide in this re-imagining contains a couple of quotes by Tony Blair. A similar approach to the preceding slide seems best, and this should be broken up into two slides because there are two quotes.

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Because Tony Blair is placed in opposition to Ahmadinejad in this presentation, he is facing the opposite direction. Also, I removed "Marketing Values" as the title. Talking about war in terms of marketing just doesn't seem to fit in with the themes of freedom and values. I'm not sure what Romney was trying to communicate with that title, but I think it sends a wrong message.

Every aspect of your slides – from the graphics used to the font to the color scheme to the amount of text – creates a feel for your presentation. The visual aspects of your presentation can either be powerful tools that help create a memorable experience for the audience, or they can serve as mindless filler that facilitates the audience in filtering you and your message out. If you prepare slides, create visuals that enhance your message and that serve as an evocative backdrop to your own performance. If you are in politics, such attention to detail might even help your momentum.

Tags: colors, examples, text, clutter, font use, mitt romney

Even though Stephen Colbert is parodying Bill O'Reilly during his The WØRD segments, he also effectively improves on the format. Look at this contrast.

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O'Reilly's screen is much more visually distracting, completely ignoring the fact that a viewer's listening capabilities are impeded when reading. The bullet point is one long sentence, and this distration is compounded by a rotating Fox logo and an ever-present news ticker. This is opposed to The Colbert Report which has a pretty clean visual style (purposefully similar to that of O'Reilly's), no ticker, and brief bullets that add to the presentation without distracting from it.

In a recent post, Garr Rynolds quotes John Sweller on verbal-textual redundancies:

"... It is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

By putting too much information on our slides – like bullet points that restate our words – we actually place obstacles between our audience and their full understanding of our presentations. The less your audience has distracting them, the more they can focus on you and your content.

Tags: text, examples, connections

Bullet points can be very harmful to your presentation, especially if you begin packing in too many per slide. However, if you've ever seen The WØRD on The Colbert Report, then you've seen a very effective use of bullet points during a talk. Look at these points and quotes below. Can you figure out which bullet point goes with each quote?



images © Comedy Central

1. "... In 2005, the army fell 24,000 short of its recruitment goals ..."

2. "Republicans aren't even telling John McCain!"

3. "... Although I bet you anything if Yo-Yo Ma had 42DD breasts and had just given birth to a love child, they'd be all over it."

4. "Forget everything."

Use your mouse to highlight right after this sentence for the answers (1=B, 2=D, 3=A, 4=C). Really, though, you probably have a pretty good idea of which bullet accompanies each quote.

Here are some quick thoughts on why these bullet points are so effective.

They can't stand alone. If Colbert were to walk away and let his points keep running, it would make no sense. Colbert provides the context, and the bullets fit into the context he creates. This stands in stark contrast to typical bullet points that spell out every detail of the presenter's discussion to the point where they can serves as handouts or notes.

They are short. You can't read and listen well at the same time, yet bullet points often take too long to read – thereby detracting from the presenter. Mr. Colbert's bullet points take a split second to digest, and the audience doesn't miss a beat of what Colbert is saying.

They say what you are thinking. Chances are, you really weren't thinking these points ahead of time, but, as soon as you see the bullet point, you wish you had been. These serve to fill in the blanks of the presentation. Again, they cannot act as the presentation itself, but they enhance the overall delivery.

Even though this format is presented in a humorous manner, it really illustrates an effective use of bullet points. Your slides should rely on you, not vice versa, and keep any text on your slides short and to-the-point. Avoid overwhelming walls of text, and allow your presentation to reinforce you as the speaker – not supplant you. People tune in to see Colbert, not his bullet points. Likewise, make sure your audiences are tuned into you more than your slides.


For some short videos of Stephen Colbert in action, visit his category on Crooks and Liars.

Tags: text, examples

We all know what to do when we need to present a list of information on a slide – break out the bulleted list layout, and plug in the facts. The results are predictable and reliable but are also, unfortunately, bland and repetitive.



In a presentation I have given a couple of times, I broke one of my rules while revising the slides and had several points on each slide. However, the tidy lists tend to be visually repetitive, and all information is equal. Bulleted lists equalize data – nothing appears more effective or more important than anything else.

In changing approaches, I kept a tidy list when presenting the facts because all of the information was equal in my opinion. However, when it comes to interventions, my experience has shown some more effective than others. In this approach, I scattered the data, and they appear in no particular order. Here, some points are larger than others, non-verbally communicating my experienced effectiveness of that strategy.



In addition to eschewing bulleted lists, these slides are also more visually engaging and the language is simpler. Less reading equals better listening. Even though they are conventionally accepted, bullets are not always the best solution for presenting information. Break the predictable, and arrange your information in a way that is unexpected and fresh, helping your talk be all the more unique and memorable for your audience.

Additional reading: Presentation Zen: Bullets and "delusional" briefing slides

Tags: text, conventions

We've touched on this issue in a couple of other posts. The size of your font is important if you care about the readability of your slides (and if you don't care, slides become pointless). Your audience does not see your slides from the same vantage point you view them from while preparing them. Something that looks perfectly readable sitting right in front of your display may be difficult for others to see sitting several feet away – even with an enlarged canvas.



In this slide, the title font is 48 points. The bullet text is 26 points. I don't think anyone would be particularly annoyed at me for creating a slide like this. In fact, it may just be ignored because it will be hard to read from a distance. Insisting on thought-mapping in complete sentences will almost always create a cramped slide. If I were to increase the font size of my bullet points here, the text at the bottom would completely disappear.

Consider this approach instead.

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On these slides, the text is between 74 and 144 points. All of this can potentially be contained on one slide by building text out as you are finished and in as you get there, or you can split these into separate slides, and the visual flow will remain just as seamless. Instead of complete sentences, key words and facts are highlighted, and very few words are on each slide – allowing the audience to focus on what's most important and allowing you room to place the text and avoid clutter.

Clear and concise text creates a better experience for your audience. Don't feel obligated to load your slides with text. Pick out important words or figures and let your narration fill in the context. After all, your slides are supposed to be supplementing what you say rather than supplanting you. Guy Kawasaki suggests always using 30-point fonts of bigger in your presentation. If you find yourself dropping below 30 points in order to fit more text, stop. Reevaluate what you have on the slide. Reduce the quantity of words and focus on what is most important, allowing for larger and more readable text.

Larger, more direct text will create a better impact and will therefore better reinforce your message. Bullets and sentences are bland and predictable. Text can be a powerful tool, so use it effectively. You might find your presentations the better for it.

Tags: text, readability

We have to be careful about how much information we load onto one slide. We need to ask ourselves if our content is being clearly illustrated or if the valuable information is being lost in the clutter. I distinctly remember one presentation where a presenter divided his slide into four quadrants and then listed four detailed bullet points under each quadrant. What irritated me more was how an audience member was addressed when complaining that the slides were difficult to read. The presenter's response to this concern? "Get better glasses." He then proceeded to turn around and read these slides to us.

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Imagine looking at these slides from fifty feet away on a screen only six feet tall.

This is obviously a case of visual clutter. The presenter is trying to cram too much information on a slide. Some people think this looks impressive, but what are you trying to accomplish? Do you want your audience to say, "Wow! That's a lot of information to digest," or do you want them to say, "Wow! It's so clear to me now?"

In these slides, the y-axis represents the Bloom's taxonomy level of a task, and the x-axis describes how broadly-applicable a task is. Items in the A quadrant would have a low cognitive domain and narrow application while items in the D quadrant would require higher-level cognitive skills and have very broad application. This is good information, but the delivery leaves much to be desired. Here is one possible alternative.

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Now no one will need new glasses!

This approach keeps the same basic approach as the example slides. The first slide retains the chart, but it is vastly simplified. I've eliminated the miniscule text that obscured the labels. Also, the numbers are gone. Simple, meaningful labels win over meaningless numbers any day. A simple gradient and translucent border was added to the circles to give the illusion of depth, and a soft white drop-shadow is applied behind the skill set we're going to cover next.

The second slide just highlights important verbs in the skills we're talking about, emphasizing what is done in higher-order, broadly-applicable tasks. The various steps do not need to be typed out word for word. Of course, if you wanted to include more verbs, build out those points you are finished with, and build in the new ones as you are ready. This simply helps to control slide clutter.

This is only one possible approach to this information. What would you do differently? How would you convey this information in your own style? One of the great things about having someone else look over your material and slides before you present is that they may suggest an entirely different approach to your material. However you organize your content, though, cluttered slides will either be distracting and frustrating to your audience, or they will be utterly forgettable because that's how so many other presentations look. Taking the time to illustrate your material uniquely and clearly will make your presentation stand out as something different.

Tags: clutter, examples, text, makeover

Back in September, Garr Reynolds posted this image on his blog without comment. Regular readers knew what he was trying to get across.


Image by Zach Graham

One easy way to kill the momentum of our presentations is to bog the conclusion down with tedious bullet points. (The other way is by ending with your Q & A session, but we'll talk about that another time.) I remember the conclusion to a Jensen Harris presentation on Office 2007 where I noticed how excited he seemed about the product, but his conclusion slide seemed sterile and stoic. I wondered, "How can this be improved?"

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Again, minimalism is my starting point, and I felt that these three words pretty much encapsulated the entire summary. ("Find the right feature" + "Be more efficient" = "Simplify" in my book.) The word "Create" is by far the largest because that is the driving point of Office – to create content that you are likely to share with others. Also, I arced the path of the builds to create a sense of movement and perspective.

Of course, as I look through some of my presentations that haven't been updated in a year or so, I'm finding some concluding slides I want to change. Here are some summations I like and others I don't from my own material. Which ones would you change? How would you give them more impact?

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Of course, it can be hard to judge a summation without context of an entire presentation, but experiment with these slides and see how you can alter or improve them. Remember, your summation will be the final impression you leave on your audience. Don't let it be injured by stray bullets.

Tags: examples, text, garr reynolds, connections

It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads my blog when I say I am not a fan of mission statements. While I think direction and purpose is vital to any organization's success, mission statements are seldom more than buzzword laden paragraphs designed to impress an audience rather than direct and inspire our colleagues.

Moreover, like the About Me slide, the Mission Statement can serve little purpose when plastered onto presentation slides.



If you are giving a presentation to your employees, they should already know what your organization or company is about. You should be communicating that through your decisions and actions on a daily basis. If leaders embody the mission, then employees will understand and follow suit. If leaders and administrators are contradicting the mission, repetition of words will not undo the message you have communicated through your example. (By the way, making your staff unison recite a mission statement is creepy – like 1984 creepy.)

If the presentation is for those outside your organization, the services or products you deliver should be a testament to your mission. Like your example to employees, if your output contradicts your mission, consumers will only grow cynical and indifferent toward your offerings.

Missions have their place, but a Mission Statement is only for the benefit of managers and administration to guide their examples and decisions. Employees and consumers will know your mission if you live it. A slide does nothing to reinforce that message.

Tags: conventions, text, avoid

Slides are often misused as a guided outline for note-taking or as a substitute for our own notes. As presenters, we let our slides become a crutch, and, instead of our slides providing a visual reinforcement for our topic, we let them simply spell out exactly what we are saying word-for-word.

Below is a slide from a Intel business presentation. Now, I don't know the exact context of this slide, but it does provide a nice example of some of the traps we fall into when creating our own slides – creating walls of unreadable and overly detailed text.


Behold the wall of text.

Now I don't know about you, but I can't read those bullet points without really straining my eyes, and I imagine that anyone sitting in an auditorium or conference room would have the same problem. The slide is just overloaded with text, and I can just hear the presenter saying exactly what is on the slide verbatim.

How can we approach this differently? In this case, I think adding slides will actually help. I'm going to take a part of the second bullet point, and turn it into two independent slides. The first will introduce the Core 2 Duo processor, and the second slide will reinforce the fact that these processors are shipping ahead of schedule. (That struck me as an important point.)

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The initial build shows the logo for Core 2 Duo, and the presenter can extoll the benefits of this advancement. Perhaps even some highlights appear next to the image. Then those highlights fade away, and the Core 2 Duo Extreme appears. Core 2 Duo may disappear, and highlights of the Extreme edition can appear to the left.

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The second slide shows a desktop calendar with the date of July 27. That's when the Core 2 Duo was supposed to begin shipping. The date fades out, and the slide reveals that Intel is ahead of schedule.

While far less detailed, this second set of slides succeeds at visual communication where the initial slide fails. Our slides do not have to serve as subtitles to our voices. Remember, slides are supplementary visuals to the presentation. They are not your notes. They are not the handout, and they are most certainly not the presentation itself You are the presentation. Your slides should serve to support you, not supplant you.

Tags: text, readability, examples, makeover, clutter

When you make a document or a presentation, the font you choose is a form of communication. Unfortunately, I have seen many examples of a chosen font communicating a very different mood or feeling than the material is intended to generate.

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In the two slides above, the first is displaying its information in Chalkboard, a font very similar to the overused Comic Sans. The second slide is using Copperplate. Which font communicates the mood of the material more precisely? Chalkboard has friendly rounded letters and looks very casual and easy-going. Copperplate is a much more formal looking font.

These slides present material about a very serious topic. Therefore, a serious font should be used. Next time you are creating a presentation, take note of what font you are using. As mentioned in prior posts, make sure you are using an easy-to-read font, but, along with this, be sure that your font does not detract from the larger message of your presentation.

Tags: font use, text

Conventional wisdom places quite a bit of text on slides. Even I catch myself transferring my outlined notes to my slides pretty much word for word occasionally. The result is mundane slides that contain walls of text. Your audience ends up reading more than listening. This is standard practice, I believe, for two big reasons:

• We don't want to leave anything important out of our slides.
• It makes printing a handout simple.

Sometimes, though, too much text can get in the way and take away from your message. Look at these two slides below. They are virtually identical, but they use their text very differently to get the point across:

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Which slide stirs your curiosity more? Which feels more impacting? The same important statistic is represented on each slide. In the first, it is surrounded by a bunch of other stuff making a complete sentence. Furthermore, it is likely that two or three additional points will accompany this point, relegating it to near obscurity by the time the clicking is done.

In the second, the stat is naked and unhidden. No one will question the point of this slide. Additionally, the second slide requires you to fill in the context and additional information. You have not relegated yourself to unimportance with this slide, nor will your audience be able to skim the information and zone out. This slide provides a fact, and you are there to fill in the rest of the information.

In general, I advise against using complete sentences on your slides. Sometimes it is necessary, but look for those cases when single words or short phrases can get the point across more concisely. Along this same vein, avoid paragraphs of text. The proverbial "Wall of Words" does not make for good slide layout and may become frustrating for those trying to pay attention to you while taking in all the information on your slides. In the case of text, less is more, and simpler is smarter.

Tags: conventions, readability, text

Earlier today, Macintalk posted an article regarding web browser performance on Mac OS X. The write-up is an interesting read, and you can find it right here. I couldn't help but notice that their graphs were created using Keynote's excellent Storyboard theme. However, one of the graphs distracted me, and I've reproduced it here.



This theme makes liberal use of Keynote's high quality shadows, and the shadows are enabled by default when you insert a table like the one seen above. It looks very pleasing, but a serious issue comes up when one tries to read the text below the graph. The shadow is obscuring the text. Now, Macintalk is not entirely to blame here. The author was not preparing an actual presentation, and this is the default location for the shadow.

Still, if I was going to present this at a technology conference or tradeshow, I would not want these shadows getting in the way of making my point. Fortunately, the solution is very easy. Using Keynote's Inspector palette, I can simply disable the shadow, or I can change its placement. Additionally, setting the text below the graph to bold will make it easier to read since it is smaller than 30 points.

In the image below, I tried to replicate the Macintalk slide as best I could quickly, and I made two changes. First, I set the text below the graph to bold. Second, I altered the shadow – decreasing its offset and changing the angel. The result?



Our table is still very attractive, and now everyone can read our text. We could still make some tweaks, but those two easy adjustments make the slide much more readable (and, if I worked for the OmniGroup, that would make me a very happy camper).

The basic lesson is this: Form is important in giving a presentation. Good slides make a good impact. However, do not let the aesthetic touches get in the way of your slides conveying your intended meaning. Look for confusing graphics and obscured text, and, if you find troublesome spots, simply fix them. After all, you don't want you audience squinting as the result of overshadowed text.

Tags: eye candy, readability, makeover, examples, text, clutter