A beginner's guide to making beautiful slides for talks | Hacker News Reader

A beginner's guide to making beautiful slides for talks

ines.io

257 pointsAnon8458 comments

These are interesting ideas for creative illustration, but I don't agree with the title that this is a guide for beginners. If you've never done a presentation before, the most fundamental graphic design principle to keep in mind (long before you might start thinking about Photoshop plugins!) is consistency.

I think that the first thing I would recommend for a beginner is to set the basic layout, typeface and background/foreground colours to something tasteful, perhaps also distinctive or using corporate colours if appropriate. These options will be under something like 'Styles' or 'Master Slide View' depending on the presentation software.

Sometimes, it can feel to me like a presentation flits between styles, as if it has been assembled by copying-and-pasting slides piecemeal from other talks. Starting by setting the default style, however, keeps a thread of visual consistency there while you experiment. After that, you can add logos that look like embroidery, glitch effects and what have you, but it will look much less chaotic than the result of creating the special effects first. It will truthfully be decoration, because you've already got a solid visual foundation to build upon.

If you'll excuse the vanity, following are the slides for a couple of my own presentations which I'm rather proud of :)

https://media.libreplanet.org/mgoblin_media/media_entries/27...

https://fosdem.org/2024/events/attachments/fosdem-2024-2719-...

It's a pretty common POV that bullet point slides are bad (there's an opposing view as well).

https://www.google.com/search?q=bullet+point+presentations+a...

From the POV that built point slides are bad, generally there is no consistency from slide to slide because each slide is just an image, graph, or diagram. I've seen plenty of great talks with zero consistency in the slides.

All platitudes are pure baloney, including this one.

Good slides are good slides, bullet points or not.

Slide’s message immediately grockable, not too jarring color scheme that’s appropriate for the occasion, and clear, crisp and concise language.

You can over do bullet points, but that’s true of every single element that’s commonly used in slides.

These are ways to make beautiful slides. But "beauty" is not typically the measure I aim to optimize when prepping for a presentation. Given the tradeoff between spending time making the content great, and finding a beautiful font, I will always choose the former. If your job is to make beautiful slides (e.g., you work for someone who gives presentations, and you make the decks), then beauty is your north star.

But for me, beauty is one small aspect of what makes a presentation good. I personally spend most of my time on the spoken content, and then build mostly-minimalist slides to accompany the content and help make it memorable. I spend near-zero time making the slides beautiful.

It sounds like you are actually in a really good place to understand the science of graphic design. It is unfortunate the author used the term "beauty", because it make non-visual people assume something. The word is loaded, so skews how you think about the subject. But this is also how graphic design works. The visual look of your slide deck can skew how your audience perceives your content. Humans are extremely susceptible to this, so knowing a little bit can have massive benefits. The article does seem to cover the basics pretty well, which is only the tip of the iceberg.

What word would you have used in place of "beauty"?

If the author had argued in favor of optimizing the visual look of your slide deck to maximize its impact on your audience (a rough paraphrasing of one of your sentences), I wouldn't have disagreed.

But if her first bullet point had been about choosing/buying the right font, I'd have demurred (and I say this as someone whose livelihood focuses 100% on the visual presentation of text!).

Aesthetics. The look/feel of your presentation - as much as possible it should feel aligned with your topic, evoke the feelings that you want from your audience, and help to emphasize the most important content.

I think the word beauty is fine. But the problem is that it means different things for different people. For example, something could be ugly and beautiful at the same time (like every single new born baby I have ever seen :P ). So whenever I see a word like that, I usually default to trying to figure out what THEY mean by beauty. And try not to bring any baggage with me.

I would have called it prettiness.

I disagree with the whole typeface (font) selection discussion in the article.

You want people to read your slides? Don't use a hard-to-read typeface.

Before building a "deck" for a presentation I suggest reading Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint" (https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil/...)

Counter-point:

"Two studies explore the extent to which this deeper processing engendered by disfluency interventions can lead to improved memory performance. Study 1 found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting."

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-hard-fonts-retention.....

Counter-Counter point, those studies were not of very high quality. Very small groups, and the “hard to read font” was Comic Sans which isn’t actually hard to read, just different. Also, Comic Sans is well known to be the butt of all font jokes, which could have been acting as some kind of marker for the content. A lot for variable unaccounted for.

On the other hand, the author of OPs “beginners’ guide” treats presentations like a brochure, which is in itself a beginners’ mistake. If you want to provide truly *excellent* advice to a beginner, point them to Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule, you cannot really go wrong with that - yes, it is geared towards pitching for VCs but the approach makes sense regardless.

For a bit more of an in-depth approach, see this dude: https://www.presentationzen.com

I genuinely think that it pays to make a presentation as generic black-on-white or white-on-black as possible.

Why? People have trained for decades on these templates, sitting through boring talk after boring talk, slowly learning how to extract as much info as they need from a glance.

The real meat of a talk is what the person is saying, and if the slides are too fancy, then people are forced to split focus.

If you look at the slides in the article they are quite cluttered – a lot of the time text has been made smaller or larger or put in a weird place (relative to a normal justification/alignment) to fit a visual motif which is unrelated to the subject matter of the presentation (e.g. the cover slide on NLP in Python).

I think this is emblematic of how the author misses a really important basic principle: layout. If you set up a twelve column grid in PowerPoint and align everything to this your presentation will immediately look much cleaner.

In terms of fonts I think much better recommendations are fonts such as Akzidenz-Grotesk or Avenir (seriously underrated font).

The MOST unfortunate thing about slide presentations is that in many contexts (particularly academic talks, and investor pitches, among other things) is that people ask for your slides before or after the talk, as a substitute for listening during the talk.

The best talks are those where the slides supplement the talk and provide visuals for the talk, and aren't trying to BE the talk. But these people above often ask for slides because they don't plan on listening but do still plan on judging you based on your talk that they didn't listen to, so you're forced to slap every piece of information on them.

(I'm guilty of this too; many times I plan on attending an interesting virtual talk in my company but I get a meeting scheduled at the same time, so the best I can do is to open both the talk and the meeting at the same time, mute the audio on the talk and screenshot every slide of the talk while nodding in the meeting.)

For this reason, good slides work for motivational and TED Talk speakers where you have undivided attention, but they don't work well in real business because people plan to not listen during the talk.

This hints at the key problem, which is that there are two kinds of slide decks: those meant to accompany a live presentation, and those meant to be flipped through with no accompaniment.

When the former are used for the latter purpose, they are near useless. When the latter are used for the former purpose, they are worse than useless.

Yes. Almost every slide deck I have been asked to put together in 25 years of work has been the second kind. And they don’t always even accompany a presentation.

Stop me when you’ve heard this one: you have a detailed status doc and a spreadsheet full of data on a particular project. Your boss tells you Director X or VP Y wants to read about that project. Those docs would be perfect! They are the canonical source of truth about the project, but the big shots just won’t read them so you need to summarize everything into a slide deck instead, which apparently people high up on the food chain can read. No matter how good that deck is it’s not going to be compete, and exec will end up with questions anyway.

So much of my career has been converting information in various forms into slide decks for people with a child’s attention span. This is one thing I’d love it if AI could do effectively and reliably. I could work 10 hour weeks.

> When the latter are used for the former purpose, they are worse than useless.

I passionately disagree with this. I find it much better to focus on a talk (granted, I'm talking here about math talks primarily) if I know that all there is to know is contained in what I'm seeing, and that it's alright if I occasionally don't pay attention to the speaker. (I'm much more attuned to the written word than to the spoken word, and I imagine I'm not alone in this.)

Yeah, the more talks I attend, the more I differ with 'powerpoint minimalism orthodoxy'. I would much rather your presentation be a subset of the slides than a superset. Then I can relax and appreciate it rather than worry about transcribing you or something. If its actually important to me than I will spend much more time reviewing the material than listening to it this once, so focus on providing a comprehensive reference. And we both know you're not going to write up a whole separate document that's the exact same material in more detail, kept up to date, so just make it the slides. The preference for minimalism I think comes from a thought process that conflates entertaining with effective. (all else equal, obviously more entertaining will make you more engaged which is more effective, but the equal is carrying some heavy weight there)

> The MOST unfortunate thing about slide presentations is that in many contexts (particularly academic talks, and investor pitches, among other things) is that people ask for your slides before or after the talk, as a substitute for listening during the talk.

I don’t know about the other contexts, but unfortunately it’s a fact of life in academia that half your audience is not really motivated to attend your talk a priori, and that a significant fraction of the other half will be distracted at some point and stop following for 5 to 30 seconds. You lose too much of the audience if the slides are not enough to follow. Another common case, besides the “I could not attend because of diary conflicts” is sending the slides to someone who could be interested but did not attend for whatever reason (after asking politely the author whether they were ok with it).

Now, that’s not an excuse for how dreadful most of academic presentations are, but you just cannot go too deep into the minimalism rabbit hole.

> But these people above often ask for slides because they don't plan on listening but do still plan on judging you based on your talk that they didn't listen to, so you're forced to slap every piece of information on them.

Or they may be unable to. For many people who have English as a second or third language, reading text is much easier than listening. Without having slides, they may be unable to follow, just like they'd need captions to follow TV shows.

Sometimes people who ask are unable to make the talk. I might have an ill student, for instance.

Just to broaden the point, what is a good set of slides very much depends on what kind of talk you are giving, it seems to me.

In my opinion, she buried the most important part under point 3 - "Slides should support your talk." Too many beginners see the slides as the presentation, and they are there to direct peoples' attention through the slides. People present. Slides support.

I was going to say this

A big beginner mistake I see if that the slides ARE the talk, but they should support your talk.

Readability is a billion times more important than visual design for presentations…

…and I'd argue that a lot (but not all) of the examples here harm readability: drawing your attention away from content, etc

Visual design is certainly important to make a memorable presentation—but you really need to start from the foundations, and then layer visual design on top.

You are correct. I will say the "billion times" can be reduced if the slides are simply a prop for the talk. But if you're trying to convey actual information on the slides, they have to be readable and not just distracting.

The one thing I hate about presentation systems like google slides is they seems to be highly allergic to accuracy and consistency.

If you're looking for careful consistent alignment with margins, fonts, and sizes respected, then you're in for a hell of a time.

You try to align things and they get fractions of an inch off or one slide is pt size 18, then then next is 18.5 or there's alignment that's the baseline as opposed to the whatever the line below letters like p q j use ... it's constant monitoring and watching, flipping back and forth making sure it didn't just "smart move" shit around the screen trying to help me out.

Then there's other things, like you're trying to move something and it selects the ruler guide instead. Can't you just lock those down? (the answer is NO)

It's really insane. They appear to assume I'm not serious about professional style and consistency.

And yes, I've tried editing the theme, going through online guides, reading the documentation.

That's part of the reason I switched to Beautiful.ai almost 4 years ago.

I hate building slides. Their tooling makes the formatting look consistent and well laid out so I can just focus on putting down the content.

Not associated with them. Just think it's insane how much time gets spent formatting slides.

I think Google Slides is really intended for people who don't care very much about graphic design and the user base either doesn't care or isn't aware that it could be a lot better. Even PowerPoint is miles better which is saying something.

It’s weird how most comments here are dismissive of the article because content is more important than looks. But the article states just as much:

> Ultimately, what your talk is about is the content. Anything visual that you add is only there to support your points, keep your listeners interested and help them follow along.

Further, this article is specifically about the aesthetics of slides! a topic not written about often, and therefore quite interesting to read.

As cool as these look, I can't think of a single instance where pretty slides made a talk more interesting or memorable to me. Buying (okay, pirating) Photoshop might be worth it if you're pitching to investors/businesspeople, but if you're presenting at a conference focus on the content and as long as the slides strike the right balance between information density and readability, it'll be fine.

It’s hard for me to think of an example where thoughtfully-designed slides alone set a presentation apart, partly because good slides are often the result of someone clearly putting the time/thought into their presentation. But they can be the difference between a good presentation and a great one.

For example, Gary Bernhardt’s Birth and Death of JavaScript is one of my favorites and certainly benefits from having nicely-designed slides.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

They are good slides that visually communicate effectively, but that’s not the same as “pretty” or “beautiful” (which are also much more subjective). Focusing on the latter doesn’t achieve the former.

There is a general feeling in STEM that when someone's presentation is a bit too slick looking they actually undermine their message and raise suspicions about their motives...like people start to feel like they are hiding something. I guess the moral is just say what you need to say and don't over think it. Or maybe the moral is that it all depends on your audience.

This is one of those instances where I wonder if there are different expectations in a more visually creative industry like Hollywood, fashion, or something where the appeal of your deck makes a meaningful difference.

Every year I spend as a developer I grow more fond of plain HTML websites like https://www.kleinbottle.com/ and slides like https://youtu.be/wGoM_wVrwng.

Maybe the more I learn how exhausting and competitive it is to be a PM or designer, the more I want to differentiate myself from them, so I can chill and work on engineering.

The reality is people go to conferences (a) to network or (b) to boost their ego. Not to actually listen to talks. Especially in CS-adjacent fields, Github repos with working code are 100x more valuable than conference talks. So yeah, nobody really cares about conference talks or the slides except the loud bearded dude whose moves between rooms questioning the rigor of every talk.

you’re right, people are in a talk because they hope to get access to someone in the room, or for data insight, you either have big visuals or you are a big deal : P

That is mhe right reason for a confrence. Watch the talks on youtube latter. While at the confrenceuse your time talking to people.

I thought it was just a couple of years ago when we started moving away from the age-old "three bullet points" formula to the "one slide per HUGE Helvetica word" template so beloved by TED talks.

So I obviously can't say a lot about the style preferences, last presentations I held just used the company style.

But hooh, that font section couldn't get any more generic, even mentioning Calibri. No hints at what font characteristics you're looking for, or good examples of that (I'd say that you're better off with something that has a lot of weights, and if it isn't already condensed/compressed, at least one option for that)

You've confused Calibre with Calibri

Not sure if parody or not.

The examples in "Example of slides almost entirely carried by fonts" look very bad to me. I honestly thought there is a catch or something but the author seems to genuinely like them...

Tastes might be different. The designs and colors on his slides look like a nightmare to me.

My advice from Kawasaki:

Guy Kawasaki: "Never use more than 5 words on a slide"

Yuck. Style over substance.

If you want to make better slide decks forget all of this, pick a readable typeface, a title weight and a content weight, and move on to the real meat:

Your guiding light is the rule of 7 +/- 2. That is the model of your audience's short term memory. It's how many things they can keep track of at any given moment. If you overflow 7 +/- 2, your audience will not follow. Also be wary of recency. If you haven't mentioned something in a while you may need to bring it back up again to keep it on top of that stack.

Next: one slide, one statement. Ideally it should be in the title of the slide. If you need more than a few bullet points and a figure to elaborate, it's too busy.

Lastly: your slides are props. They do not need to be "complete" in their coverage. They are props for you to use while you give the REAL presentation which is in the medium of spoken word. If your slides do not facilitate understanding of your speech, or worse if they hinder it or distract from it, your slides suck. At the same time, avoid the trap of single bold word slides that give no guidance. Your slides are the map, your speech is the territory. Both matter.

P.S. As a rule of thumb any sentence that needs to wrap around to a second line deserves scrutiny. Always ask "could this have been a diagram?". Running examples, especially coupled with good illustration, are also excellent.

My favourite meta-talk post is Zach Holman's 'The Talk on Talks'. https://zachholman.com/talk/the-talk-on-talks/ It covers some of the same basic design territory but also touches on delivery, Q&A, etc.

I came to recommend this as well. Still relevant. I hope he's doing well.

I’m doing not too bad these days, thanks for the well-wishes! :o)

That was a nice reference, I found it more interesting than OP.

> the only advantage I have, really, is that I’ve been hacking around with Photoshop and web design since I was a teenager.

Can't really think of a bigger advantage than that.

Heard of spotlight.is? It can beautify your presentation with audio triggering your slides. The way you design it is either with the inbuilt basic options. But where it gets interesting is if there is something you want to do that’s not offered on the layer options, just right click on the element to open your browsers web inspector and spotlight.is will save what you see: https://youtu.be/Tgw9X47PTg4

Here’s a post: https://a.spotlight.is/on/redundancy/made/Feb-16-2024

'Beauty' is in the eye of the beholder. For me the slide examples presented are garish, cluttered, near illegible and very unappealing.

Then again, my decks usually have near zero text on them and consist of mostly full bleed photos for emotional engagement and illustratoons/graphs for supporting technical details. The downside is if you need to supply handoits or a standalone uou have to make an entirely separate deck.

(I'm assuming the article was in good faith and not meant as a hoax)

Sometimes you don't want pretty. If you are trying to convince people to support something then crayons can direct people to not look at details that should noc be decided yet

While there are some cool artistic works in the article, I don’t think that they make great slides. They seem to be more of an infographic style. Something meant to be examined in detail.

A talk shouldn’t be focused on the slides, it should be an exercise in audience engagement. Slides should inform, not distract, but support the speakers interactive process with the audience.

Simple, clear, uncluttered layouts that require minimal focus to support the speaker are what slides should strive to be.

Just my $.02. YMMV

She leads with fonts being the most important aspect of beautiful slides?

Sorry, that is very backward thinking. And not very helpful at all if you have to follow a style guide (like for your company).

Content is the most important thing for any slides. “Beauty” means keeping slides simple and to the point. Very simple graphical composition can go a long way.

I also am not a fan but personally of overly cartoony kind of presentations. It fits in some contexts, but when I see it in engineering or development it rankles me. Maybe I’m just old.

I love these guides. One that I want is excluding brutalism. I really can't stand it. At all.

My perspective may be a little biased from being a compulsive adblocker for over 2 decades, but I think those slides are far too much visual overload and will distract from the content; and I suspect those who do see ads all the time may be fatigued by and mentally try to "block" a lot of the content too.

I'd throw this guide in the trash:

1. tiny fonts

2. too busy slides

3. way too much text in them

People complain my slides are too simple. (They're supposed to be!) Stick to 3 points. Remove all unnecessary words. Make the font as big as you can.

Never, ever show a slide full of code.

When you think you're done, proofread the slides from a realistic distance through somewhat foggy or out-of-focus lenses.

Prepare for this to turn out to be half way through the project. You just thought you were done :(

In addition, you can also turn down the brightness if you are auditioning the slides on a computer monitor, in order to simulate projectors having a low light output.

Have way more slides than you need, and pick only the best, way in advance. Keep surplus slides filed away handily in case of more detailed future presentations, or if you are well organized some of them can be used for ad-hoc Q & A sessions.

Any text or images that fail readability from the back of the room because it's too small or too difficult to perceive detail, might as well be dramatically condensed into a larger font, or left off altogether. If a lot needs to be said on a particular slide, speak it out loud clearly and simply, after adequate rehearsal.

Always carry spare long HDMI cables, the ones from the AV contractor are often badly worn out, I like to bring one brand new in the package.

You may also benefit if you start out so the native resolution of your slide template is the exact same as the projector the AV contractor will be supplying to the event. These are not usually very high resolution, and business projectors have been pretty well standardized at lower resolution than entertainment projectors, neither one as high as many computer monitors these days. There may also be a difference in the resolution of projectors used in different sized rooms, with the bigger rooms having the higher-dollar equipment. If you can't get the exact info in advance from the AV contractor beforehand, see if there is any contractor or AV rental group that knows about this and can inform you of what you are likely to be encountering in the local area.

Also make sure your battery can last as long as the presentation in case that stage wiring fails too.

Be bold whether you have a microphone or not, you need to be loud enough to be heard, so it really works to always pretend there is no mic and have strong enunciation. If there is a mic and it's too loud then, turn it down or move away from it, don't hold back instead. Given the same material, holding back is just not as engaging. It can also be good to look at a different audience member, or at least in a different direction toward the audience, while talking about each different slide, and then look away from them to the screen to draw their attention to it. It's possible to have a quite technical presentation without a pointer this way if you plan for it.

Did I mention auditioning your material and a full dress rehearsal?

You decide how much you like being the star of the show up on stage without any rehearsal.

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