How to get rid of crappy presentation slides
No one likes to see crappy slides. I am sure that you have encountered many situations where information projected on slides is confusing and difficult to see. Slides you see in a meeting, a conference, or presentation sessions you have attended. In the end you walk away not having understood the key message or what the presenter is driving at. Isn't that crappy?
If your audience cannot see what you put on your slides, it's as good as not putting anything there. Very often we do not pay much attention to the clarity of our slide content. We tend to cramp too much content into a single slide making it difficult to see, complicated, and many times confusing.
There are many ways to get rid of crappy presentation slides. Here are 5 easy steps to begin with.
- Have a clear objective. Having a clear objective to start is important in all presentations. A clear objective will ensure that we can better decide what to include and what not to include into our presentation slides. Without a clear objective, we tend to include everything making slides complicated.
- Focus on the key message. For every slide, ask yourself what is it that you would like your audience to take away. There should only be one take away message on each slide. If you need to include more than one, then try not to go beyond three.
- Draw your ideas. Develop your ideas (or look at your information) as visual blocks instead of lengthy text sentences or messy charts. This will allow you to create slides for your audience to see instead of for reading.
- Remove unnecessary content. Unnecessary content such as footnotes, description in small prints, lines, shadows, colours, non-related images, etc. makes the slide messy and complicated and should be removed from presentation slides. Removing unnecessary content gives the side better clarity.
- Keep it simple. In the end, try to keep every slide simple. Regardless of whether the content is text, numbers, charts, or images, keeping it simple helps audience understanding and retention.
Give your audience a break. Don’t frustrate them with crappy slides. Start with the 5 easy steps above to un-crap your presentation slides.
