BizClarity

I know what the ultimate, modern-day slide presentation should look like.  I can visualize it, and I’ve seen it done successfully in investor presentations.  Rich visuals, minimal text, lots of white space.  I push the book Presentation Zen on everybody I meet because it evangelizes the promised land of rich visuals, minimal text, lots of white space.

But when I’m working with a client and time is short, it’s unrealistic to expect somebody who’s been thoroughly inculcated in what I call the “old school” text-heavy style to make radical changes overnight.  So I’ve developed a list of short cuts , a few easy steps for making slides more visual and readable that can be applied to an existing presentation literally overnight.  These aren’t the ultimate solution, but they yield the highest return-on-effort for a time-crunched entrepreneur.

Here is the BizClarity Cure for Clutter:

1)     Prune text

2)     Increase image size

3)     Suppress template (title and logo elements)

4)     Split slides

Prune Text

Most slides are too wordy because, duh!, they have too many words.

Filling a slide with text is a bad habit, a carry over from the worst practice of designing slides to be printed out or emailed.  Or the lazy habit of using slides as the speaker’s notes.

The solution is ruthless editing. Look at every line, every phrase, every word and ask, “does that do more harm than good?”  Anything that isn’t helping the audience in a huge way to understand and remember the key idea of that slide should be slashed, burned, and buried.

Never paragraphs!

No long sentences  (very short sentences are sometimes ok)

Short telegraphic phrases

If you have the guts to be radical (or if you’re under 30), try getting some of your slides down to nothing but a few words in the center of a slide surrounded by white space.  Works well with single numbers too.

Keep repeating the mantra “less is more” as you slash.   Because it’s true.  The words that survive will stand out and mean more.  It’s all about how much the audience can handle in the moment.  When you offer only a few words at a time, the audience tracks with you from point to point.  They have time to read the words, listen to you, and connect ideas to your bigger meanings.

Increase Image Size

Why use an image that’s too small for the audience to see?  Why?  It makes no sense.  Yet I see it all the time.  Little photos of products, clip art, little charts, all crammed onto slides along with too much text.

An easy fix is to look at every image and, as with text, assume a bad-ass attitude and delete any that don’t contribute hugely to the audience absorbing and remembering your point.

With images you deem essential, make them bigger.  Really big.  Fill the slide, or half the slide.  Make a statement with the image.

For photos, be careful that when you expand the size the photo that it has enough native resolution it doesn’t get too pixilated.  Pixilated images look bad, amateurish. Since you’ve decided the image is necessary, make the effort to get a high-res version.  The Internet has any generic image you could every need, including the stock photo sites (like istockphoto.com) and Google Images.  If it’s a photo unique to your company (product photos, customer installations, etc.), insist on photographs taken with a high-quality digital camera and processed correctly.

Now that the image is filling all or most of the screen, see if it helps to layer a few choice words of text on top of the image.  Be sure there’s enough contrast so that the text is legible.  For example, put dark text on top of a blue sky, or white text on a darkened doorway or floor that isn’t the focal point of the image.

The same goes for charts and graphs and diagrams.  Make them big, or don’t use them at all.  Make all labels easily legible.  Eliminate keys–label directly on the graphic.

Most clip art should be junked.  An exception might be a professionally designed set of custom graphics that helps show your product.

Suppress Templates

Who said you have to show a logo on every slide?  Not your investor audience.  It’s a meaningless habit, a carryover from corporate policy manuals and a consequence of the total-control philosophy enshrined in PowerPoint software.

The same goes for slide titles.  You do not need a title on every slide!

And if you do have titles, keep them in proportion to the rest of the content.  You don’t need to reserve a full 25% of the most prime slide “real estate” at the top of the slide for a big, top-heavy title box.

Templates—slide masters—in PowerPoint (and Keynote) are useful for keeping fonts, colors, and graphic elements consistent.  But remember YOU are the master of your slides, which means you have veto power over your slide master.

Again, with a ruthless, bad-ass, bring-‘em-on attitude, go through your deck and look for any slide that can survive just fine, thank you, without a title, a logo, or any other elements that are automatically thrust onto the slide from the slide master.

Generally, slides with photos, charts, or diagrams look better if you don’t have extra junk at the bottom.  Take out the junk and you have more room to show the things you want your audience to pay attention to.  Colliding graphics—text or content graphics overlapping a template element—are inexcusable.

Text slides or bullet slides—yes, bullets are sometimes exactly the right choice for a slide—are often a good place to let your logo and corporate colors shine through.  A rough rule of thumb is to have your logo on no more than a third of your slides.

By the way, when you do show a logo, it should be small and preferably in the lower right corner of the slide.  (Except on the title slide, where it should be centered in the top half and big.)

Split Slides

An easy fix to an existing presentation is to look for slides crammed with content that can be distributed over two, three, or four slides.  This is also how you make room for big images and legible text.

If cluttered slides is your problem, you are probably among the millions who were taught to dedicate a single slides to a single idea or topic.  A single slide for marketing strategy, for example.  Another one that describes your management team (and advisory boards).  Another for your full product pipeline.  You unconsciously fight adding any more slides than necessary.

This worst practice is another carry-over from the discredited logic of creating slides to print out, read to the audience, or count.  (See my earlier post, The 10 Slide Rule is Wrong.)

If you find a slide where you have three columns, for example, or three major bullets each with a cluster of sub-bullets, see if it doesn’t make more sense to break the slide into three separate slides.  No, it won’t take more time to present.  You just flip through the slides faster (that’s what clickers are for).

If you have two charts on a slide, and they’re both essential, put each on it’s own slide.  (If there’s a critical comparison you’re trying to show by having the charts side by side, then design a single chart to pinpoint the comparison.)

Same for photographs.  It it’s worth showing, it’s worth directing our attention to one at a time–which is what slides do best.

If you have text, chart, and photo all on the same slide, scream real loud! Then fix it.

Once you are liberated from the idea of one idea = one slide, you can get creative.  There’s no reason, for example, why a long list can’t scroll down into the next slide for effect.  Or span a long horizontal timeline across two or more slides—reinforced by using the horizontal sliding transition to give a panning effect.

There are purposeful exceptions to the break-it-up-so-we-can-see-it rule.  One is a logo field where the point is the total effect of all the logos.  And for some list slides, where the full list is the point, not individual entries.  (This doesn’t work for photos, though.)

Divide and conquer!