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Comment by sugarkjube | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I go to a tech conference, I see slide after slide filled with a wall of text, or in the best case 3 to 5 bullet points with text only.

A picture says more than a thousand words.

As much as I'd like to use a simple markdown based tool to create my presentations, most of these appear to come short regarding visuals (1).

Look at the 2007 iPhone introduction - thats how you use visuals to deliver a message.

Going from bullets to visuals is definitely not easy, and while I'm not as brilliant as Steve Jobs, I always give it my best shot. And a supporting tool makes it a lot easier.

(1) if anyone knows about a md-based slide creator supporting good visuals, I'm open to suggestions.

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I have this discussion quite a bit with colleagues who specialize in communication.

I want to convey technical and scientific material. My presentation isn’t to motivate a billion people to buy an iPhone. My presentation is meant to inform 50-100 people to learn a new technique. And the slide deck is markers for where they can follow up later for detail and references.

I too see presentations with walls of text. I go to academic and scientific conferences. This is helpful to me. I like it better than posters. I don’t want to go to a conference and have a bunch of Steve Jobs (or more likely Elizabeth Holmes) giving one word per slide presentations.

I also don’t have 100 people working on my slide deck. It’s just me. I don’t need a TED talk.

I wish people would recognize the different purposes and audiences for presentations.

The inside joke among academicians is that our slides have wall of text because we make them on the flight while going to the conferences! Our presentations tend to be bland because the audience is reading off the slides and ignore what the speaker is saying. That's why for our doctoral students we make it mandatory to present at least twice internally before presenting to external audiences. Otherwise, they have these giant tables copied from the manuscript and pasted on the slides, which most people can't read without binoculars.

Yeah but people will put 40 lines of code on a slide and read through it, expecting that it will explain the underlying concept while I’m trying to parse a ton of code in front of my eyes.

Most of the time that I am presenting technical material, I spend it on explaining the concepts through short descriptions, hand-draw illustrations or diagrams.

If there’s code to show, it will be smaller snippets interspersed between those slides. If attendees want to deep dive into 100 lines of code, it is best that they do it on their own time at their own pace after I send out the materials.

I actually talk about code but this applies to non-technical presentations too. Yeah, it’s also not a sales presentation but don’t wall-of-text me.

Explain concepts to me.

I don't know if Markdown based slides are good or bad but Apple has plenty of bullet point type presentations in their WDC videos

Like here's one

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10056/

The style for big conference keynotes and breakouts is often different (and often should be). And, as mentioned elsewhere, the production values and effort that goes into keynotes is not practical for everything else—though the level of effort different companies put in varies.

I have the same opinion as you and use remarkjs a lot at work. It obeys the markdown rule that you can devolve to real html and I handle my images with real img tags and styling.

I'd honestly prefer using straight html for the whole slidedeck, but want my slides to be user friendly for others who may inherit/fork them.

I sometimes use text-only or text-mostly presentations. And sometimes graphics-mostly presentation work fine too. My typical presentation is probably somewhere in the middle with the caveat that I’m not presenting at academic conferences and the level of technical content varies.

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