Creating Slides
3 Ways to Make Slide Building Easy
If you have a corporate job, you might also be under the curse of developing slide decks. To some degree, we all probably had moments where we stared at a blank slide deck for hours, or went through iteration after iteration trying to make it look ‘just right’. Well, I’m no stranger to the struggle and fortunately, I was able to learn a few lessons to make my slides stand out a bit more than others. I want to share the know-hows I picked up along the way in the hopes that it makes your work a liiiiitle bit easier.
#1. Know Your Audience
Did you roll your eyes? If you haven’t yet, go ahead. It is obvious and and you’ve probably heard this phrase several times but there’s a reason why people bring it up over and over again. Knowing your audience is the first step to deciding the details of your presentation.
- What is the story that you’re going to share?
- What is the level of details you will (or can) share?
- How formal or informal of a story can you share?
- What will the audience do with your story?
The first 3 should be pretty obvious to anybody that has had a few reps of slide building but it took me a few years to learn the fourth bullet. Let’s try breaking it down further.
The popular rule of thumb is that you need to have more pictures than words on your slides. This isn’t wrong, IF your goal is to leave your audience with a story and be done with the delivery. In this case, the focus of the presentation should be the teller of the story, which is you. So the slides should be designed as supporting materials, which help you ‘illustrate’ the story.
But what if your audience will most likely be referring back to those same slides at a later time, or even repeat the story to a different audience themselves? Imagine a sales pitch being delivered to a room of mid-level leaders or a technical breakdown of a product to a manager who will be training his staff. A ‘illustrative’ slide is probably going to be insufficient and they will need supplementary information. If they decide to move forward with your presentation, that is. In these cases, make sure the slides contain enough detail to make it make sense. It can be wordy and have a set of images and diagrams, as long as they successfully tell the story.
#2. Tell a Story
If you’ve decided on what information should be delivered to the audience, then it’s time to start putting your story together. Ideally, each slide could and should be a small story in itself. Pull together the pieces of ‘information’ you need to deliver and decide how it should ‘move’. Because that’s what stories do: they flow, build, contradict, or conclude. Here are some examples.
Flow
If one piece of information leads to another, or if the sequence of the layout matters, lay your puzzle pieces down following some path.
Build
If there is a hierarchical relationship between the elements you’re illustrating, I found it to be most effective in stacking them vertically to outline the details. Imagine a business plan that stacks layers of value propositions for different customer groups.
Contradict
Contradiction, comparison, juxtaposition. It’s all the same. Highlight key information that needs to be pointed between 2 or more entities. Tables works great but when you have the real estate of an empty slide, why stay in the box?
Conclude
Does your story boil down to a single conclusion that you can point to? Great. Let’s highlight what the end of the story looks like and make sure to add a hint towards what path was taken to reach this end.
#3. The Details
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but yes, details do matter. Typos, grammar errors, and accuracy of information are all important components of course but so are alignments. Details are like to buttons to a shirt. It’s just a button and it being a little chipped or having a different shade doesn’t ruin the shirt. But once you see it, then you SEE it.
Humans are rather cursed with noticing the slightest misalignments. Images that don’t line up on the left, icons that are not spaced out equally, a slight bias to the side or a small unplanned tilt all slightly eat away the credibility of the presentation.
Fortunately, Power Point comes with a simple feature that will automatically align the content for you.
Start a habit of simply aligning things after each slide. Once you get used to the shortcut combinations, it will become even simpler to ensure the alignments like using Ctrl+S to save your drafts.
Slide building is somewhat more of an art than science. And as such, there is not real right answer. Everyone has a different style of story telling and aesthetic preferences. While creating great slides could be a great skillset to develop, just remember. In the end, all this is a way to tell a story. If given a choice to be great at one or the other, I would choose to be a great story teller.
