The art of slide design: Maximise signal, minimise noise | Hacker News Reader

The art of slide design: Maximise signal, minimise noise

seckington.com

79 pointsmooreds27 comments

One thing to nuance is that this style is not universally the right way to use PowerPoint in many contexts, a slide deck is the preread and the post-read notes, because it is not considered a presentation tool but a document with the concept of one idea per page at heart. In consulting, it is one of the key deliverables (though what is discussed is condensed and has moved some exhibits to an appendix section). Some clients preferred to also have a Word memo, which works well as a pre-read but doesn't have the intuitive link with the preread looking the same as the document being discussed .

Now I work at a place where everyone makes slides with fewer words, for preread, discussion and reference, and I find they're useless as a preread, because there isn't enough context.

That’s more slides as a summary tool (following something like Barbara Minto’s approach) rather than as a presentation tool

Minto’s approach is beloved by the big 4 consultancies

Encourage anyone interested in communicating to watch this.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY&pp=ygUQaG93IHRvIHN...

He has a pretty funny response to someone asking him to review slides. He immediately says there are too many words and too many slides without even looking. Which I have found to be true 90% of the time. Excellent presentation.

I was confused what kind of "slides" this post was about when reading the title/intro, so in the interest of fighting clickbait: It's about designing PowerPoint slides, not playground slides and not UI sliders either.

Though I'm slightly disappointed there isn't a 10 part series about the principles of playground slide design.

Take a look at this site then :)

http://playgrounddesigns.blogspot.com/?m=1

Ok, that's really cool!

In the first few days at my previous job I was asked by my bosses' boss to "give them tips to design slides". I told them something of the lines that I don't like at all that "telling stuff with PowerPoint slides" culture of the directorate of uni and that a PowerPoint slide can be fatal ([0]) - but they brushed it off as some sort of nonsense.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/death-by-powerpoint/

Telling your bosses' boss that the thing they inquire you to help them with is actually stupid and bad sounds like an astonishingly bold move – even more so in the first few days of a new job. How did it play out?

It’s always interesting when people ask to have slides shared because I minimize what’s on the slide…so I can talk about it. If I’m not presenting the slides aren’t going to help much.

Sometimes this is for pre-reading, which can help focus discussion.

It's also helpful for folks who are more readers than listeners to have text to follow along with on the slide.

They can also serve as memory anchors/reminders to people after they saw your presentation.

I also like the way Maciej Ceglowski archives his presentations: Slides, with little to none text in the left, combined with a summary of the actual talk on the right. Makes it extremely easy to retrace the talk from the archives and even get all the jokes and rethorical devices from the original presentation.

Example: https://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm

(Imagine if he was just giving away the slides on the left without any text, it would basically be a random collection of images without any understandable meaning)

Nobody has time to pre-read, and if they’re readers and not listeners they should not be at the meeting. They should be doing something else.

The only place I ever saw people pre-read was Amazon, and that was because we printed out the document and handed it out with pens. The first 10 minutes of the meeting were laptops down reading time before the presentation.

There are ways around that, e.g: number the slides like 1/7, 2/7, 3/7 so people roughly know where we are in the presentation, even better if you can time it, e.g: 1'/20, 3'/20, 7'20.

When I see advices like this, I always remember Garr Reynolds [1] PresentationZen and, above all, Guy Kawasaki's rule of 10/20/30 [2]

  A pitch should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

[1] https://www.presentationzen.com/

[2] https://guykawasaki.com/the-only-10-slides-you-need-in-your-...

Ok, now instead of a slide presentation about cats, do one discussing the mathematics of a reinforcement learning model, or the results of a brain-imaging network connectivity study, or a research paper on modal logic.

And then talk to us.

The most effective slide design are those silly meme pics. They are really good at the two points of the article: Focusing on one purpose per [pic] and reducing distractions on your [pics].

I've done a presentation or two consisting entirely of images and memes.

It forced me to really memorize what I was presenting because I couldn't refresh my memory from text on the slides (or, horrors, read the slide aloud). I typically don't use speaker notes.

But afterwards, the slides weren't much good to the participants or to future me.

What was your goal in that presentation?

Great question. I was trying out the format (of only images). I wanted to focus the audience on what I was saying. IIRC it was a meetup presentation so the stakes were low.

Hm, that is not the goal to me. It could be:

* Entertain them. Meme pics should work great here.

* Inform them. Here I would suggest to not use slides at all but rather show a document (blog post, handout, etc) which works on its own afterwards. This is also my ideal approach for these meeting presentations where everybody asks for the slides afterwards.

* Persuade them with a clear call to action. Here meme pics are also better in my opinion. However, I'm quite liberal here. The "pic" could be a complex diagram. My point is make a clear single (!) statement with the slide.

I was thinking of playground slides from the title - maximize signal (sliding smoothly down the slide) and minimize noise (from bumpy surfaces or too-tight turns).

One of the often missed out points in these suggestions is the target audience.

Make all slides for one persona/one type of audience only.

End User Buyer Developer Tester Manager/Director Project manager Product manager VP CEO CTO

If there is a meeting with everybody in it - show the slides meant for the most common persona first and a few others next.

Some years ago I attended Edward Tufte’s information design course. His solution to the “May I have your slides?” problem is to produce a separate high-density handout for participants. In that way the slide design takes whatever form suits its low-density format, and the handout has the high information density of print. I’ve tried to implement that to mixed success. In academic settings people still want the slide dump so that they have a note-taking framework without having to work too hard to figure it out on the fly. It has become such an expectation…

There are two kinds of slides: the ones that you present, and the "reference" slides that are more like a business-accepted container format of text, images, spreadsheets, tables etc. where you write down facts and information.

Be aware which one you're creating, don't mix them up (although it can be okay to have the "info package" after the last presented slide).