The Golden Rules of Presentation Design | Hacker News Reader

The Golden Rules of Presentation Design

blog.thenounproject.com

These golden rules just remind me of every useless, content-free landing page that I find myself on when trying to research B2B applications, and even a good chunk of open source projects.

The main difference between the two being that the open source projects tend to have links to what I want to read about, and the paid software—sorry, “client solutions”—have about 10 menu items that all link to either a form to have someone give me a demo, or a form where I have to prove I already bought the goddamn thing in order to see how it’s supposed to be used.

While there's a lot of good advice in there, the reality is that--unless you're giving a keynote or similar at a conference--one document is going to serve as the presentation, the document for the presentation even for people who didn't listen to it, and (related) the historical reference for the presentation. Maybe that shouldn't all be the case but it is. People giving a presentation aren't going to create multiple docs.

That's what the speaker notes are for. In PowerPoint, you can go into the print dialog, choose "Notes" mode, and print that to a PDF. Each slide gets its own page, with the slide taking up the top half and the speaker notes taking up the bottom. [1]

I use this all the time to keep my slides sparse for when I'm presenting, but fully detailed when I distribute them as PDFs after the fact.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/print-speaker-not...

That assumes you create speaker notes. I'm also skeptical that many people who don't need to deliver the presentation themselves pay much attention to speaker notes.

What I often do in this situation is to have the "presentation" slides in the front of the deck, with the "detailed" slides at the back. That way you can just present the first slides to people in the room, and then circulate the same deck for offline reading with all the details in the last slides.

You're still creating multiple sets of material of somewhat disjoint material but, yeah, that's probably the easiest way to do it given a lot of people want to consume even detailed material in slide form these days. Certainly very few people, at least in a non-academic setting, will read a companion 3,000 word document you create.

ADDED: The other thing I see a lot is just create a very detailed slide deck but don't try to actually present it in detail. Which probably works well enough I guess given that it's a modern sort of expectation.

Brilliant, thanks for the idea. Sounds simple but it's a great way to address both audiences.

If you're using Asciidoc to generate your HTML presentation with Reveal.js[1], you can use the `notes` block to make speaker notes accessible in the presentation in Speaker View (press [s] key in HTML, Reveal.js opens new window for speaker mode where you can see notes, timer, some other crap. See also https://revealjs.com/speaker-view/)

Example

  ----

  == Here's a slide

  The Crowd Sees This

  [.notes]
  * this is the new block type for speaker notes: sidebar
  * `notes` role required (written `.notes` in block attribute)
  * source is slightly more compact
  * and not tied to an admonition which can be useful in slides

  == Another Slide!

  Holy heck we got a lot going on

  GOODBYE

  ----

Furthermore, you could also filter out content that's ONLY destined for presentations by using the Conditional Directives vs the backend attribute. See also https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/attributes/docu... and https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/directives/cond...

[1] Asciidoc Reveal docs https://docs.asciidoctor.org/reveal.js-converter/latest/

VSC Asciidoc-Reveal extension https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=flobilos...

If you want your presentations to have a bigger impact, I think putting the work into creating an additional document on top of the slides is well worth the effort.

I built myself a custom tool for that a few months ago and it's been working really well. I described that here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations...

That still sounds like a lot of work. I'm pretty sure I'd be much more inclined to write an article/blog or series thereof on the topic rather than having something tied to the presentation format. Just as a lot of people don't watch 40 minute videos they don't read equivalent text either.

Often, what I present is interrelated with what I write but they don't tend to be 1:1.

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