Create Less Annoying Powerpoints
Like Jessica Rabbit, PowerPoints don't mean to be bad; they’re just designed that way. Follow these guidelines to improve your presentations and reduce the needless suffering of audiences and presenters worldwide.
Steps
- Choose a simple template with high contrast between text and background, though preferably not a white background with black text, which can cause eye strain (and effectively blind people in a darkened presentation room).
- Avoid gradient backgrounds. They make text clarity inconsistent, and are reproduced less faithfully across different monitors and projectors.
- Avoid the temptation to put your logo on every slide. The more you show it, the less it means.
- Use no more than five fonts and font sizes throughout the presentation. Using three or more fonts/sizes is called "ransom noting" in the design community; it is the annoying mark of the amateur.
- Use the 8 x 24 rule: no more than 8 lines and 24 words, total, per slide. Put further details in the Notes section.
- Never read an entire PowerPoint slide verbatim to your audience, unless they're in kindergarten and you're reading them a story. In a business setting, it makes you look like you don't know what you're talking about, and puts the audience to sleep.
- Use sans-serif fonts (e.g. Arial, Helvetica) because they are easier to read on-screen. Serif fonts (e.g. Times Roman) are easier to read in print; use those for printed notes.
- Use capitalized words sparingly, because they decrease reading speed. Notice how your reading speed accelerated when the last sentence switched to lowercase? There's no advantage in capitalizing beyond the first word in a sentence.
- Let the viewer know how much longer he has to suffer by having "x of y" on every slide; this will help the audience pace itself in terms of attention and energy. After you've completed your presentation, select View > Master > Slide Master (command will vary per PowerPoint version; these directions are based on PowerPoint 2003). Depending on your template, you will probably see a <#> on the lower or upper right corner. Immediately after it, add a space and the words "of x" and replace x with the number of slides in your presentation, so your fifth slide will read "5 of 23," for example. Depending on your version of PowerPoint, there are fields/macros that also perform this function.
- Don't end your presentation with the default black screen with [End of Show] on it. Add a closing slide, or at minimum a blank slide to end the show.
- Never use the one word/letter at a time animation. there is nothing more annoying then trying to read something and it is coming one word/letter at a time.
Tips
- Use as few words as possible on each slide, because it takes about 1/3 longer to read something on-screen as on paper, and you don’t want to have to stall your conversation while they catch up. It is fine to omit articles (a, an, the) to keep a PowerPoint within the 8 x 24 rule.
- keep animation down to the minimum, if use it at all. it is annoying and old. it is not cool to have your text fly across the screen when someone is trying to take notes.
