You have finished your storyboard and your script. Now it is time to open your PowerPoint and actually make slides. Here are some guidelines that help you to translate your story-board into slides that do not confuse, but do create impact.

Avoid confusion

The visual channel always wins. Not only the wrong images cause losing the attention, the wrong use of them has the same effect. Good design is invisible. Well-designed slides do not make people think about design, they just work. A few principles can help you to create such slides.

Consistency

While filling in your slides, consistency plays a key role. Every time you use a different font, colour or format, you are implying a change in meaning. If there is no change in meaning, the audience will be wondering why you used this other format, font, or colour, and while doing so, they stop listening. Consistent formatting gives your presentation a calmer appearance and does not impede the transfer of information. Before you begin to fill in the slides, first compose a ‘corporate identity’. This is a selection of fonts, colours and other visual elements. Apply this corporate identity to all your slides. Only deviate from it if you have a good reason for doing so.

Textframe: Constructing a “corporate identity”

While constructing a unified look and feel (like a brand does), you can think about the following aspects:

• Fonts: select a clearly legible font, such as: Calibri, Rockwell, Helvetica, Segoe, or Gill Sans. Choose a font size for titles, bullet points, captions, etc. A rule of thumb here is that if you can read it in the Slide Sorter View in PowerPoint, it will also be legible on the screen.
• Colours: choose a colour scheme beforehand. Include colours for the background, text, highlights and other visual elements. The colour wheel can be of use when choosing a colour scheme. Shades of the same colour (monochromatic, e.g. only shades of blue) or neighbouring colours (analogous, e.g. blue and green) give a harmonic look and feel. If you use opposites (complementary, e.g. blue and orange), this introduces more contrast. Sometimes only shades of grey and one extra colour (achromatic plus one) can be a very powerful option. Also your colour scheme can be related to the subject of the presentation. Blue stands for the ocean, mint green reminds of healthcare and hospitals, and green symbolises sustainability. A Google search for images in your topic can be of help.
• Graphs: use the same format for your graphs throughout the presentation. This means that your graphs should match your corporate identity. Choose a very clear font (e.g. Gill Sans) for use in your graphs.
• Other visual elements: use the same format for all coloured boxes, lines, dashed lines, drop shadow, arrows, etc.

Stick to the plan and use your corporate identity on every slide. This means that, if possible, you have to redraw graphs, models, tables, etc. so that they easily blend into your slides.

Simplicity

In order to take into account the limited working memory of your audience, you have to keep your design as simple as possible. The cliché less is more certainly applies in this context. Limit yourself to that which is absolutely necessary and leave out all the rest.

Textfram: Making simple slides

Here are some guidelines you can use in this context:

• Not too much text. Do not place more text on your slides than is strictly speaking necessary. Key words support spoken text better than sentences that are written out in full. Even the often mentioned 7×7 guideline (maximum 7 bullets and 7 words per bullet) involves much too much text. Try where you can to use an image instead. Show, do not tell.
• Not too much emphasis: you have a number of tools at your disposal to emphasise important words or phrases: bold, italics, underlined, font size, colour, etc. Use these tools sparingly and never use more than two of them at once.
• Nothing that does not have a meaning. Never use meaningless visual elements. Components of a scheme that appear in the same field belong together, and arrows often indicate a relation. When seeing these kinds of visual elements, your audience will expect you to provide an explanation of their specific meaning. A meaningless line or field will lead to confusion and inhibit information transfer. This also means that you should never use an image for decorative purposes alone.

Textframe: The case against Templates

Do you use the slide template of your host institute? Our advice: no. Templates often add distracting visual information to slides that will violate the above mentioned principle of simplicity. Also, templates are met for promoting your host institute on e.g. conferences. This interview is foremost about you and your ideas. Linking to your host can also be done with a trimmed down version of the template.

Congruency

Images are stronger than sounds. If you are using images that do not match what you say, the image will win and you will lose your audience’s attention. You should therefore leave out any unrelated images. This also applies to the emotional value of your words and pictures. A serious story should not be combined with funny pictures and a sad image should not be combined with a joke. Keep in mind that images you are used to and that are illustrative of the subject (e.g. wounds, skulls, terrorists) can be shocking to others.

Structure

A clear structure in your presentation, in words and images, will increase the transfer of information because your listeners know what to expect and they know where you are in your story. In a short pitch it is not necessary to put in a table of contents slide. This would take valuable time. Since you will be using a structure that is very familiar to the panel members, you do not need to announce it on a separate slide. You can just mention the structural component in the slide title (for example: introduction or results) or mention it in speaking (for example: “the most important results are”, “in summary, I would like to argue that”).

Visual logic

If your use of images is logical, it will promote the transfer of information. The meaning of the images you use should be immediately understandable. Respect the expectations of your audience. When time is depicted, it runs from left to right. A time line that runs from top to bottom, or from right to left confuses your audience. The same applies for colours. In our Western culture green means positive, red means negative. If you apply the colour green to indicate something bad, this is illogical and confuses your audience. The same goes for orientation. Put on top what is most important, put below what is less important (like a pyramid).

Textframe: Gestalt laws

Applying the Gestalt laws could also help. Three important Gestalt laws you should respect in slide design are:

• Proximity: objects or shapes that are close to one another appear to form groups. A subtitle explaining a picture should be closest to the picture it belongs to.
• Similarity: we see what physically resemble each other as part of the same group. Red boxes belong to red boxes and blue circles belong to blue circles.
• Enclosure: shapes and objects that are enclosed by the same line or coloured box belong together.

These principles of grouping show in an intuitive way what belongs together and what not. Respecting them helps your audience to find meaning, violating them creates confusion.

Complexity

If you are using a complex model, for instance to explain your hypothesis, it is useful to build this model step by step. This allows you to give your audience the opportunity to first understand the components and then the entire model. In this way, you can avoid the disconnection which may result from an overdose of complexity. You might want to use animations for this purpose.