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Comment by submeta | Hacker News Reader

When I make Apple style presentations (no visual noise, no bullet point lists, one appealing visual / idea on one slide etc and narrating the story instead of showing densely packed info in one slide after another), I can literally see how my audience is really enjoying the presentation, getting the idea, but then constantly management approaches me telling me to use the corporate template, stick to the template, use the template elements, etc.

They just don’t get it. What comprises a good presentation. Even if they themselves enjoy the content while they are in the audience.

Futile.

Edit: Tangential: I am the only one using a MacBook in a company of 700+ coworkers.

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In my experience, people also use slides as a document rather than an aide. In all my presentations I prefer to use slides as a companion to my planned speech. Then afterwards I'm completely surprised when people ask for my slides. I send them gladly but they're completely useless on their own.

So I have also experienced my managed pushing me to put all the information on the slide so that you can just read the slides and understand all the ideas, and the presenter is reduced to a voice over.

Two slide decks combined into one. Each presented slide should have a hidden slide immediately following that is the corporate style info dump. Then you get the best of both worlds.

When you present it - It’s a nice deck of slides that keep people interested and help them to listen to the presentation. But when they download the deck, they see the slides that have all the details.

So kind of like a postcard where one side are pretty pictures and the other is the content?

I use slides, but heavy on the notes.

The notes in each slide, go into detail. I also like to use transitions and animations (not too obnoxious, though). Many of the slides in the shows referenced below, need to be played, as they may have a number of "steps."

Makes it worthwhile to ask for my slides, and helps me to stay on track. I generally don't read the notes verbatim, but stay on the topics they describe.

Examples: [0], [1], [2], [3], [4]

[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY/ITCB-master/tree/master/P... (A couple of Keynote presentations that are part of a teaching module on Core Bluetooth)

[1] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_V... (Google Slides -Discusses effective communication)

[2] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11ZvUjZogJ86-AIsAv1Q3... (Google Slides -A basic -and dated- intro to the Swift Programming Language)

[3] https://littlegreenviper.com/cruft/CommunicationBasics.pptx (Downloads a PowerPoint for [1])

[4] https://littlegreenviper.com/a-quick-introduction-to-the-swi... (Blog entry for [2])

Simon Willison's annotated presentations are the GOAT: slides followed by the transcript of your talk for each slide

https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations...

I wish Maciej gave more talks, they are always very well prepared and entertaining:

https://idlewords.com/talks/

Yeah, I think this sort of thing is a much better format than a slide deck, even if there’s a load of speaker notes you could read.

As much as Simon’s blog is generally good to stay up to date on LLM’s this is not a good way to do a presentation at all.

We shouldn’t conflate expertise from one field with ability in another.

I think you may have misunderstood what an "annotated presentation" is.

It's not a new way of giving presentations. It's a way of publishing your presentations after you have given them where you turn the slides into a longer form written piece.

So it can't be "not a good way to do a presentation at all", because I give presentations exactly the same as everyone else does! Slides with images and a few words.

What's different is that I take the time to write them up properly afterwards.

Here's my most recent example - in this case it wasn't a whole presentation, just the slide portion from a three hour workshop: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/15/building-on-llms/#llm-...

Bunch more examples here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotated-talks/

What's appropriate amount of information in the slides depends on the nature of the presentation.

For short focused presentations (<10 min) minimal slides are the best if the verbal presentation is strong. For longer and more complicated ones more detailed slides are better for the audience. Audience will get distracted or misdirected at times, and making a clear and well flowing enough speech for more detailed and longer presentations is extremely hard.

I think of the (imo legendary) presentation Jobs gave when introducing the iPhone. A brand new product with features and usage patterns that most people never saw before in a mobile device.

It had very little of those highly detailed bullet point slides, but you didn’t feel like after watching that presentation you didn’t “get it”.

That’s the barometer I think about when it comes to presentations

OK, fine, when I'm introducing a new cell phone model to the public, I'll do it Jobs's way. But that's not optimal for an in-depth technical presentation with actual content behind it. It will annoy the present audience and frustrate future readers.

The idea that one presentation style fits every audience, every product, every scenario is just weird. Nothing else on the planet works that way, so why should slide decks?

Completely agree. Ironically, by focusing on Jobs' presentations, people are admiring the type of presentation that they will probably never do, and they do not consider that it probably cost 100s of man-hours to prepare it. I think it is more important to develop more practical skills to communicate effectively whatever you need, while not spending too much time on the deck preparation.

I’m talking about the delivery. It’s not a lot of fluff, relies more on visuals / demos / examples than bullet points and is information dense and perhaps most importantly it’s well paced.

In my opinion this works well for technical presentations. I’ve given more than a few talks following the style and I’ve always been told it’s good stage presence and I’ve gotten a lot of compliments from the audience

In-depth technical presentations were identified as a contributing factor to the Challenge crash. That's why Amazon's meetings have memos.

https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd...

I started thinking of those presentations as a joint reading sessions.

I got around this by keeping the slides simple but dumping all the supplementary information, including most/all of the presentation content, into the notes section of each slide.

That way if I sent people the deck they'd still have all the content.

It's a while since I put anything on Slideshare, and I think it now does include notes, but it used to annoy me that back in the day it didn't.

I fight to record any presentations I do as often as possible. When I am asked for the slides I send the full recording instead as the way to manage this exact issue.

Few things are as frustrating as finding slides from what seems to be an insightful talk strongly pertaining to what you are working on, but no recording of that talk to watch.

I applaud the effort to record such talks, especially in the current age where you know few people will actually watch it and appreciate your effort (but some big LLM provider will certainly lift it as part of a mass scrape and charge a few bucks for access to your findings without crediting you).

What do you expect people to do with that? Spend another hour rewatching the thing? Push it into some AI summary tool?

If information is important enough to bother someone asking for a copy of it, but not important enough to spend an hour ingesting, I'm not sure what to tell you.

The thing is: When working with the material afterwards the important part are the small details. The talk/recording are good for the high level overview and following along on the big picture, but for details it is annoying as one has to jump around for specific words and phrases. Something written or an image/diagram is a lot better to study in depth.

And there lies the trouble with slides: During a talk they should support what is being said, but they are often abused as also being the handout for afterwards.

It sounds like you want detailed documentation. That’s fine, but that’s not what a talk is. A good talk isn’t a reference. And good documentation isn’t an engaging talk.

If people want that, produce two artifacts. Don’t try shoehorn a talk into being documentation. That’s just a recipe for bad work.

It depends on what the talk is about. Of course Steve Jobs' of cited iPhone introduction didn't have any details for in depth research later on, but was a high level product introduction.

A technical talk however explains a concept, a tool or something and thus contains technical information to follow up with, but for that I need the words, the phrases stated so I even know what to look for in the manual. And probably I want to follow it in the order they presented it (I hope they thought about the order they presented it in!) however the manual is ordered more in a reference order.

So yeah, if you do a high level marketing talk it doesn't matter, but then I also won't spend the time on watching a second time. If it has technical depth, then being able to follow the depth is good.

I have dealt with this issue as well before. If folks need something more in depth I will use a LLM + some massaging of my own to create a supporting document. Here is an example of a very disorganized conversation and the supporting document I made with it: https://www.danielvanzant.com/p/what-does-the-structure-of-l... It has clear definitions of the key terms. Timestamps for the important moments, and links to external resources to learn more about any of the topics.

Slides should just have relative links to supporting content online that is accessible on same website/domain and can be downloaded as a single zip.

It is not that complicated really, no need to reinvent the wheel.

I've been in this situation. I'll spend the hour watching the info, but I'll dislike the inefficiency. I consider it impolite.

Not a complete mitigation, but VLC et al plays back at 1.5X+. Highly recommended.

Lots of things fall into this category. Speech is very low information density per time.

Thankfully speech recognition and AI summary is a thing now.

This type of phrasing is strange to me. I guess it depends on what you consider to be, and not to be, “information”.

Reading a bullet point summary of Moby Dick certainly would compress the time required to understand the plot.

Isn’t the prose or phrasing part of the transmission?

For most talks, I would say no. If I were going to a lecture by Pynchon (ha!) I would want to listen at 1x. For 99% of talks at conferences which are mostly just a way of communicating technical data, a text transcription that is then reduced in word count by 50% is probably only a very small loss (if that), and a 90%+ time savings.

This gives me an idea for a website. All of the talks of a conference, audio transcribed and LLM summarized into 3-minute reads.

It might be worth doing the whole INFOCON archive…

Information should be indexed https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/

Wait. I'm unclear what your point is.

Is it that asking for a copy is an unreasonable burden that should require a significant time investment from me?

I've sent many copies of many things I made in my live. It's not so bad. And it's easily shared with many people at once.

Or is it that people can't ingest any meaningful information in less than an hour?

That's clearly not true either. A five minute article can contain extremely valuable insights. A 30 second conversation even more so.

The slices of a good presentation are worthless without the presentation itself. If the deck is valuable in and of itself, it could have just been an email or word doc in the first place.

Well, it's not the reality of most slides I've seen. Most of them seem to be a pretty good summary of the talk. Weirdly, some of them contain more information than the talk.

I do believe most presentations I've seen could've been an email or an article. So I guess I agree with you?

> I do believe most presentations I've seen could've been an email or an article. So I guess I agree with you?

Yeah, I really should have said that in my original post. Most presentations could have been a one pager, and any presentation worth sitting through the slides aren't worth having.

My company records all presentations: it’s like sharing the slides, but better, since we just have the entire presentation again.

Always recording is a good practice I think. It's so cheap with video conferencing that you might as well. Even if nobody uses it later, it didn't cost much. And if you get that one presentation that provides stellar value it's a gift that keeps on giving.

I don't really agree that a recording is always better than the slides. Slides are a text medium, and as such can be searched. You can also go through them much, much faster than through a recording (even if you can listen at 2x). If you're just looking for something specific, slides can be much better.

And sometimes you need to get the whole experience. And then the recording is much better.

Yes, why not? Those who missed the real thing can watch it sped up and skip parts, saving time.

Yeah, recordings are fine for those who missed it. And with video conferencing recording is so easy that you might as well do it, living the motto "better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it".

But when someone specifically asks for slides, it just feels like a dick move to say "you don't want the slides, rewatch the whole presentation instead".

Sometimes you're just looking for the link on slide 45, the pithy problem description on slide 5, or, y'know, you just want to quickly go through the main points again.

Why would I want to listen or watch a presentation (even sped up), when I can read a transcript many times faster, can scan through for the bits that are most relevant, and can quickly jump back to review something if I want to?

It's only when you read the transcript of pretty much any presentation or podcast that you realise how superficial most are and how low the information density actually is.

> Spend another hour rewatching the thing?

Yes?

There exists a slider at the bottom of most videos you can click and drag to your prefered location /s

A video of the presentation is pretty much always better than just the slides. Even if you got the slides you'd have to click through them to find the one you were looking for. Your argument could just as easily be phrased:

"What do you expect people to do with that? Click through and read every slide?"

And it would make about as much sense as the original argument (none).

> Your argument could just as easily be phrased: "What do you expect people to do with that? Click through and read every slide?"

I've had considerable practice at reading. Learned it at a young age, and I got to be pretty good at it over the years. I can get through a slide deck much faster reading it than watching a presentation.

Thank you for pointing out that watching the presentation and clicking through the slides takes you just as long. I assumed most people were at my level of reading speed. It must've been hard coming forward like that. I'm sorry I made you go through that. In the future I will check my privilege.

I've experienced the same thing. I work with ad agencies, and it's common for my client to then turn around and present the same information to their clients, so they'll ask me to put every last word on the slide. It hurts my soul.

I call it two kinds of slides: presentation slides and reading slides. The latter type probably should be a different type of document, but they are wildly popular.

And since you're often expected to hand over the slides afterwards, I try to find a middle ground. The slide will have more than 5 words, but hopefully not too many. Pictures/graphs help with this.

One thing I like to do is interleave these two kinds of slides one by one. Put your visual on one slide, and longer-text bullet points on the next.

Then while presenting the visual you have the bullets of the next slide in your presenter's view, and you can just skip that slide during the presentation. Then, when people ask for the slides they will indeed get all they want.

Reminded me of this which is a MIT lecture called “how to speak”

https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY?si=8avRVtQ9blfD43Pf

Best advice on this I've encountered: use speaker notes, and optionally distribute them as a printed handout or separate digital artifact.

I've struck a tentative balance with the main one line messages being the slide titles, with other slide content buttressing the main point.

I can tell the audience to ignore the content and focus on the title for certain slides; or just repeat the slide title before and after for emphasis, etc... while also having access to all kinds of supporting evidence (as is often necessary for technical talks).

PS: Beware that stripped-down / minimalist presentations are suitable for the specific kind of communication / impressionism that Apple marketing is known for. But that's almost exactly the opposite of what is necessary in other situations. So that style is far from universally applicable; mustn't elevate form over function.

I always direct people to Beamer's (latex extension to make presentation decks) doc for their guide on presentation. https://texlive.mycozy.space/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc... (Getting Started > Guidelines for Creating Presentations)

Some excerpts:

  * Ideally, a table of contents should be understandable by itself. In particular, it should be comprehensible before someone has heard your talk.

  * A frame with too little on it is better than a frame with too much on it. A usual frame should have between 20 and 40 words. The maximum should be at about 80 words

  * Do not assume that everyone in the audience is an expert on the subject matter. Even if the people listening to you should be experts, they may last have heard about things you consider obvious several years ago. You should always have the time for a quick reminder of what exactly a “semantical complexity class” or an “ω-complete partial ordering” is.

  * Keep it simple. Typically, your audience will see a slide for less than 50 seconds. They will not have the time to puzzle through long sentences or complicated formulas

  * Do not use more than two levels of “subitemizing.” beamer supports three levels, but you should not use that third level. Mostly, you should not even use the second one. Use good graphics instead.

  * Never use footnotes. They needlessly disrupt the flow of reading. Either what is said in the footnote is important and should be put in the normal text; or it is not important and should be omitted (especially in a presentation).

  * Use short sentences.

  * Put (at least) one graphic on each slide, whenever possible. Visualizations help an audience enormously

  * Like text, you should explain everything that is shown on a graphic. Unexplained details make the audience puzzle whether this was something important that they have missed. Be careful when importing graphics from a paper or some other source. They usually have much more detail than you will be able to explain and should be radically simplified

  * Do not use animations just to attract the attention of your audience. This often distracts attention away from the main topic of the slide. No matter how cute a rotating, flying theorem seems to look and no matter how badly you feel your audience needs some action to keep it happy, most people in the audience will typically feel you are making fun of them

This is good advice for boring talks, and the kinds of people who make them.

Imagine the same advice being given to standup comedians: “Bits should be a medium size, not too long.” “Avoid long words and try not to alienate your audience”. What a snooze fest!

A good talk is a performance piece. It should be simultaneously entertaining and informative. You do that by using narrative, by connecting with the audience, and by being compelling (via emotion and showing your own pleasure to the audience). If the audience is so busy reading your slides that they don’t pay attention to you, you’ve failed as a speaker.

I’m going to take a big risk here. I challenge you to go watch any great talk online, in just about any field. Watch Steve jobs introduce the iPhone. Watch a standup comedian. Watch a tech demo. Or your favourite conference speech. Or any popular YouTuber. They will almost never be this kind of talk, with subheadings and the appropriate amount of “supportive graphics”.

These “rules” are well meaning, but mediocre. They might even be helpful for a lot of people. But you should aspire higher. Aim to give a great talk. Not just a talk that’s slightly less horrible than your peers.

I couldn't agree more. These "rules" are to help people avoid really really bad presentations. They shouldn't be viewed as an official way of making good presentations.

The "say what you're going to say, say it and then say what you said" rule is probably the worst offender here. It's meant to stop people missing out important context but very often it just leads to boring repetition.

Funny you should mention stand-up comedians because the best presentation advice I ever got came from a workshop my company arranged that was given by a standup comedian. His main message was to follow the "hero's tale" format, which you'd think doesn't apply to tech presentations, but you'd be surprised how often it actually does.

I used to do technical sales and I couldn't agree more. Everyone wants to be part of a compelling story.

> * Ideally, a table of contents should be understandable by itself. In particular, it should be comprehensible before someone has heard your talk.

The typical agenda slide often is more than useless in my opinion.

There are cases where it is good - if you have a recording and discuss individual topics and thus can jump around (but then have time marks as well and jump options in the player), but 99% of agendas are useless and speakers waste a lot of time on them (1. Introduce the speaker 2. Introduce the problem 3. Show old solutions 4. Show the new solution 5. Summary)

Hear, hear!

A ToC slide should typically be avoided -- especially if you only show it once.

Advice I heard but don't know the source of: audiences tend to have a "stack" of about 7 items, possibly less. Only put stuff on the stack you are going to use.

A linear story fits well with this advice. A ToC breaks linearity and tries to push all of its items onto the stack, without any payoff. Within 2 slides, the audience has forgotten your ToC slide, since there's no point to keeping it on the stack. Best case, there's some minor payoff -- but almost never worth the cost of saturating the stack. Most often, it is an unnecessary crutch. So unless it is mandatory (could be for students), just make your presentation's narrative flow logically instead.

As others have noted, this comes from people expecting the slides to work as a document without the presenter. This is a bad idea (other document formats are better for that). But you can satisfy that desire in one of two ways:

1) Add lots of speaker notes, containing all the detail you presented, so that the combination of the presentation and speaker notes gives the self-contained information.

2) Write a separate self-contained document that contains all the information of the presentation, with slides containing a few words becoming section headings, and slides containing a useful image or chart becoming figures with captions. That'll be more useful than a corporate-style presentation deck would have been, but contain all the necessary information. Add a note to the top saying "This document contains all the information previously given in an X minute presentation. NAME is available to re-present this material on request."

You need two versions, the detailed one to share afterward and a stripped back one that you talk to.

I use the “notes” section for more detailed content. Doesn’t help if I have to share physical copies of the deck, but works fine if I pass along the whole file.

the what copies? where? no, when? are you regularly giving talks in the 90s? are you the one messing with the timeline!!?

I like to do this, and have done so for our pitch deck as well, where I've got the "presentation" deck which I can run through in 1-5 minutes, vs the "shareable" deck with way too much info per slide.

Having a separate presentation deck also allows for stories and visuals (eg personal photos) that I never include in the shared deck.

there is a great difference between corporate presentations vs sales presentation

People on WWDC are there because they wanted to.

Most corporate presentations are not like that. Yes, I am sure HR is very excited about that new expense reimbursement process. And the UX team is super happy about website redesign. And the team members sitting on the front rows are really enjoying hearing about their work.

But most people who watch those don't really care. They only go to presentations because the other channels are insufficient - the team could not be figured out how to create concise docs that still have all the important details, so now everyone has suffer through another long presentation instead...

In this case, you don't want "one visual per slide", you want to have informative slides so someone who is watching your presentation while eating lunch, or on 2x speed, does not get lost. Ideally, slides would be self-standing and presenter would only be needed for those who don't want to read.

Listen to your management. They get it, you don't.

There are several different types of slides, and understanding it's purpose is the key success and agreement. At the very least I coach my team to think are these presentation slides (fee bullets, some visuals, focus on the speaker), vs are they or will they become reference slides, which will be read by people not at your presentation or some time later. And there's my all time (/s) favourite, project management by slides.

I found it (eventually....) futile to rage against corporate culture of misuse of slides for purposes other than presentation. That's likely where your disconnect lies though. Hope you have better luck than I did long term!

Slides have unfortunately moved well beyond their intended use. People (management) often asks for more and more information density, but that's not the point of slides. What they really want is a report or memo. Slides were meant to convey information during presentation and don't hold up well absent that context. I hate slides as a medium outside of the specific text of a conversation - they're a bad pre-read, and they're a poor meeting summary. It's unfortunate that slides have become _the_ corporate communication medium.

Well yeah, you have to put the new cover sheet on your TPS report.

> constantly management approaches me telling me to use the corporate template, stick to the template, use the template elements, etc.

It sounds like the best policy is to carry on ignoring them.

The best presentation ever was at the time consoles pricing was around 350 and there was no console like the Playstation One and the Sony representative said: 299 and walks away, it does not matter the powerpoint software used, why a product is revolutionary is what matters. I don't care who was the Sony presenter.

I have been doing white text on black slides for close to 15 years now.

Totally agree with you when I have to use the template.

...and it gets worse: this type of presentation is easily 10x more work to prepare, practice & deliver, and totally under-appreciated by the promoters of reading a wall of text. I went to business school, so basically have a Bachelor's of Power Point, and my tolerance for shity slide decks is close to zero.

> They just don’t get it. What comprises a good presentation.

I take it one could argue between what's a presentation and a talk but to me one of the very best presentation I've seen is Rich Hickey presenting Clojure.

Then there's "Simple made easy" considered by many to be one of the greatest ever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4

There are many bullet points: but he'll go through each them and only show the next bullet point once he's done with the previous one. He even kids about a made up graph on one of the slide.

I think that what makes a good presentation depends a lot on what's being presented.

> Tangential: I am the only one using a MacBook in a company of 700+ coworkers

It's not tangential. It speaks about what kind of a company it is.

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