Posts Tagged ‘Slides’
What your boss really wants when they limit your slide count
Slide count is always a hot button topic in my workshops and coaching sessions. Time and time again I hear the same refrain:
I only get ten slides.
Whatever the number might be, the constraint is always a challenge for my clients because it creates friction with slide design best practice: to convey a single concept on each slide. To heed that advice means there will be more slides. Sometimes a lot more slides.
The way most people try to meet the slide count limit is by crowding the slides. The oldest “trick” in the book is dividing the slide into quadrants and putting four slides onto it—one per quadrant.
This trick (and others like it) are only worsened by the common practice of using slides as speaker notes (or because we want them to be useful as a leave-behind), thereby overburdening them with text.
Having worked with thousands of people—many of them are the very bosses who impose slide count limits—I can attest that there are generally two reasons they do so. With a clear understanding of their underlying reasoning, we’ll better achieve their objective for the presentation… and might just be afforded more slides to do so.
Read MoreThe problem with most pitch decks (and presentations of all kinds)
Probably more than 90% of the entrepreneurs I help prepare to pitch for funding make the same mistake. (Frankly, more than 90% of all presentations make this mistake.) In a practice session with an entrepreneur this week, it surfaced immediately, on the second slide… and all those that followed.
The problem?
Read MoreIf you have more than one image on a slide, do this
I’m a proponent of a single image on a presentation slide.
Just a single, clear, compelling image. As the old adage goes, it’s “worth thousand words.” More images are likely to confuse the image with too many “words.”
If, however, you really need to incorporate more than one image on a slide in order to convey the intended message of the slide (as in the case of a “team” slide in a pitch deck, for example), here are a few ways to make that message come through clearly and minimize visual clutter:
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