On Slides
April 10, 2007
From the great Presentation Zen:
[A]s you examine your work from previous talks remember this rule of thumb: if your presentation visuals taken in the aggregate (e.g., your “PowerPoint deck”) can be perfectly and completely understood without your narration, then it begs the question: why are you there?
I’m more and more convinced that presentations should not have slides with more than maybe a dozen words on them, and preferably less — obviously they won’t be very useful for someone taking a look at them afterwards, but that’s not what they’re for.
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This page contains a single entry from Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff posted on April 10, 2007 5:03 PM. The previous post in this blog was James Clark on JSON vs. XML. The next post in this blog is Ajax Alternatives. Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.
Comments
I tend to stick to that rule except for ‘code’ slides if I’m giving a technical talk. And I try and get the code sample down to the smallest chunks I can. To be honest, I’d rather present with a deck of 3x5s for notes and not bother with the projector, but I accept that some things need the reinforcement.
Posted by: Piers Cawley at April 12, 2007 2:47 PM | link
You’re of course right about the “code slides”. Regarding leaving out the projector completely, another aspect is that having some visual support helps keeping your audience interested — which may be hard otherwise, depending on how amusing and interesting speaker and topic are :-)
Posted by: Stefan Tilkov at April 12, 2007 5:53 PM | link