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Chapter 17: Enhancing Presentations with Slides and Other Visuals
This chapter completes the coverage of presentations with advice on creating effective presentation slides
and supporting materials such as handouts.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
Planning Your Presentation Visuals
Selecting the Type of Visuals to Use
Verifying Your Design Plans
Choosing Structured or Free-Form Slides
Advantages and Disadvantages of Structured Slides
Advantages and Disadvantages of Free-Form Slides
Designing Effective Slides
Designing Slides Around a Key Visual
Selecting Design Elements
Color
Artwork
Typefaces and Type Styles
Maintaining Design Consistency
Creating Effective Slide Content
Writing Readable Content
Creating Charts and Tables for Slides
Adding Animation and Multimedia
Functional Animation
Transitions and Builds
Hyperlinks
Multimedia Elements
Integrating Mobile Devices in Presentations
Completing Slides and Support Materials
Creating Navigation and Support Slides
Creating Effective Handouts
Learning Catalytics is a “bring your own device” student engagement, assessment, and classroom
intelligence system. It allows instructors to engage students in class with real-time diagnostics. Students
can use any modern, web-enabled device (smartphone, tablet, or laptop) to access it. For more
information on using Learning Catalytics in your course, contact your Pearson Representative.
17: Enhancing Presentations with Slides and Other Visuals 17-2
LECTURE NOTES
Section 1: Planning Your Presentation Visuals
Learning Objective 1: Explain the role of visuals in business presentations, and list the types of visuals
commonly used.
Visuals can improve the quality and impact of any presentation by creating interest and illustrating points
that are difficult to explain with words alone.
They add variety and increase the audience’s ability to absorb and remember information.
However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that your visuals are a presentation:
• Particularly when using presentation software, it’s easy to fall into the trap of letting the slides
take center stage.
• Your message is the presentation, not your visuals; your visuals are there to help support and
clarify what you have to say.
Selecting the Type of Visuals to Use
You can select from a variety of visuals to enhance presentations, each with unique advantages and
disadvantages:
Prezis are the dominant example of nonlinear presentations:
• Advantages: Flexibility, the ability to incorporate video and other media elements, and a
more dynamic look and feel than conventional slide shows
Slides created with PowerPoint and similar programs are the mainstay of most business presentations:
• Advantages: Relatively easy to create and edit (at least for simple slides), designs are easy to
customize, slides are easy to incorporate into online meetings and webcasts
Overhead transparencies are seriously old school, but they do have advantages:
• You can create them with nothing more than a marking pen.
• You can write on them during a presentation.
• They never malfunction.
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However, you need to stand next to the projector during the presentation, and you may be hard-
pressed to find a projector these days.
Chalkboards and whiteboards are effective tools for recording points made during small-group
sessions.
With digital whiteboards, you can print and email copies of whatever is written, too.
Flip charts are another dependable, low-tech tool for meetings and presentations. You can record
comments and questions during a presentation, create a “group memory” during brainstorming
sessions, and keep track of all the ideas the team generates.
Be creative when choosing other visuals to support your presentation. Some possibilities:
• Video of a focus group talking about your company
• Samples of a product or material, which lets the audience experience your subject directly
• Mock-ups and models to help people envision what the final creation will look like
• Software to show a new product’s design
• Screencasts that shows the software in action
• On-screen annotations and an audio track to explain what is happening on-screen
Verifying Your Design Plans
After choosing the medium or media for your visuals, think through your presentation and plan
carefully before creating anything. Review the plan for each visual and follow these steps:
Let simplicity be your guide:
• Creating simple materials often takes less time, and time is a precious commodity.
• Simple visuals reduce the chances of distraction and misinterpretation.
Use your time wisely; presentation software can be a blackhole of wasted time and energy.
Class discussion question: Do you need slides or Prezis for every presentation? How much information
can you share strictly through the spoken word before you should resort to visual supports?
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Section 2: Choosing Structured or Free-Form Slides
Learning Objective 2: Explain the difference between structured and free-form slides, and suggest when
each design strategy is more appropriate.
The most important design choice you face when creating slides is whether to use conventional structured
slides or the looser, free-form slides.
Both design strategies have advantages and disadvantages, and one or the other can be a better choice for
specific situations.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Structured Slides
Structured slides follow the same basic format throughout the presentation; in fact, they’re usually
based directly on the templates, which provides some advantages:
• Fast and easy to create: simply choose a design theme, select a template, and start typing
However, structured slides have potential disadvantages:
• Mind-numbing, with text-heavy slides that all look alike
Advantages and Disadvantages of Free-Form Slides
The goal of free-form slide design is to overcome the drawbacks of text-heavy structured design by
fulfilling three criteria for successful presentations:
• Provide complementary information through both textual and visual means.
With appropriate imagery, free-form designs can also:
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In addition to these benefits, however, free-form slides have three potential disadvantages:
• Effectively designing slides with both visual and textual elements is more creatively
demanding and more time–consuming than simply typing text into preformatted templates.
Effectively designed free-form slides should still be unified by design elements such as:
• Color
• Typeface selections
Section 3: Designing Effective Slides
Learning Objective 3: Outline the decisions involved in using a key visual and selecting color, artwork,
and typefaces to create effective slide designs.
“Death by PowerPoint” refers to people being bored to metaphorical death by mind-numbing
presentations.
The problem is not with the tools, however, but how they are used.
In addition to the temptation to pack too much information onto every slide, “slideument” hybrids try to
function as both presentation slides and readable documents.
Designing Slides Around a Key Visual
With both structured and free-form design strategies, it is often helpful to structure specific slides
around a key visual that helps organize and explain the points you are trying to make. Two examples:
• A pyramid suggests a hierarchical relationship.
• A circular flow diagram emphasizes that the final stage in a process loops back to the
beginning of the process.
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Selecting Design Elements
When designing and creating slides, always keep the audience’s experience in mind: what will it be
like to view this slide while listening to a speaker?
As you select the design elements for your slides and create content for each slide, recall the
previously discussed six principles of effective design:
• Consistency
• Contrast
Color
Color is a critical design element, far more than mere decoration. Effective use of color:
• Grabs the viewer’s attention
Color can also play a key role in the overall acceptance of your message. Color visuals can
account for:
• 60% increased chance of an audience’s acceptance or rejection of an idea
Color choices can also stimulate various emotions. Remember, however, that color has different
meanings in certain cultures, so when creating slides for international audiences, research these
cultural differences.
Artwork
Every slide has two layers or levels of visual elements: the background and foreground.
The background often stays the same from slide to slide, particularly with structured designs.
Issues to keep in mind when using a background include:
• The less your background does, the better.
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• The background needs to stay in the background; it shouldn’t compete with foreground
elements.
The foreground contains the unique text and graphic elements that make up each individual slide.
When creating the foreground, consider that artwork can be either functional or decorative.
Functional artwork includes:
• Photos
In contrast, decorative artwork doesn’t deliver textual or numerical information, but can be
helpful if it:
• Establishes an appropriate emotional tone
• Amplifies the message of a slide; simple, high-impact images are easier to remember than
text
Decorative artwork is unhelpful if it:
• Doesn’t add value
Decorative artwork is usually the least important element of any slide, but it often causes the most
trouble. Don’t include decorative artwork that gives your slides an unprofessional, cartoony
appearance.
Typefaces and Type Styles
When selecting typefaces and type styles for slides, follow these guidelines:
• Avoid script or decorative typefaces, except for limited, special uses.
• Use serif typefaces with care and only with larger text.
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• Allow extra white space between lines of text.
Maintaining Design Consistency
Don’t force viewers to repeatedly figure out the meaning of design elements by making arbitrary
changes from slide to slide.
Presentation software makes consistency easy to achieve, particularly for structured slide designs.
The less work readers have to do to interpret your slide designs, the more attention they can pay to
your message.
Class discussion question: Can making your slides more visually appealing and attractive (aside from
functional improvements in readability and so forth) help you get your message across to the audience?
Why or why not?
Section 4: Creating Effective Slide Content
Learning Objective 4: Explain how to create effective slide content.
When creating effective slide content, remember to watch out for information overload.
Writing Readable Content
To choose effective words and phrases for slide content, think of the text on slides as a guide to the
content, not the content itself. Stuffing slides with too much text creates several problems:
• It overloads the audience with too much information, too fast.
Slide text should not display your entire speaking script or highlight every point you intend to make.
Instead, slide text serves as the headings and subheadings for your presentation.
You primarily want your audience to listen, not read. Use slides to:
• Highlight key points.
• Summarize and preview your message.
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When writing content for text slides, keep your message short and simple:
• Limit each slide to one thought, concept, or idea (except when you specifically need to
connect two or more ideas)
• Limit text content to four or five lines with four or five words per line.
• Don’t show a large number of text-heavy slides in a row; give the audience some visual
relief.
Creating Charts and Tables for Slides
Just as text needs to be simplified for projection, so do many charts, graphs, tables, and other visual
elements.
Detailed visuals can be too dense and complicated for presentations. Follow these guidelines:
• Reduce the detail. Eliminate anything that is not absolutely essential to the message.
• Simplify. Complex visuals are difficult to interpret on screen.
• Shorten numbers (if doing so doesn’t hide essential details).
Adding Animation and Multimedia
Presentation software offers a wide array of options for livening up your slides, including:
• Sound
• Animation
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Always consider the impact that all these effects will have on your audience members.
Animation and special effects can be grouped into four categories:
• Functional animation
Software packages offer numerous tools for moving and changing things on screen; just as static
graphic elements can be either functional or decorative, so too can animated elements.
You can control every aspect of the animation, so it’s easy to coordinate the movement with the
points you’re making in your presentation.
Use animation in support of your message, not for decoration or because it looks cool.
Slide transitions control the motion as one slide replaces another on-screen:
• Subtle transitions ease your viewers’ gaze from one slide to the next.
• However, many of the transitions are like miniature animated shows and are distracting.
Builds control the release of text, graphics, and other elements on individual slides.
This helps draw the audience’s attention to the point being discussed and keeps them from reading
ahead. They are much more useful than transitions, when used with care and thought.
The point of a build is to release information in a controlled fashion, not to distract or entertain the
audience. Stick with the subtle, basic options for builds.
A hyperlink instructs your computer to jump to another slide in your presentation, to a website, or to
another program. Hyperlinks are an effective way to customize presentations. Hyperlinks can be:
Other advantages to hyperlinks include the options to:
• Click an action button and jump right to the two or three most important slides.
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Multimedia elements offer the ultimate in active presentations.
Using audio and video clips can be an effective way to complement your live message.
Keep these elements brief and relevant, as supporting points for your presentation.
Integrating Mobile Devices in Presentations
Smartphones and tablets offer a variety of ways to enhance presentations, such as:
Section 5: Completing Slides and Support Materials
Learning Objective 5: Explain the role of navigation slides, support slides, and handouts.
Just as with messages, review slides and other visuals for:
• Content
• Style
Also, make sure that all visuals are:
• Readable. Can text be read from the back of the room? Does text stand out from the background?
• Consistent. Are colors and design elements used consistently?
• Simple. Are all the slides and the presentation as simple as possible? Can you eliminate any
slides?
• Audience centered. Are the message and the design focused on the audience?
• Clear. Is the main point of each slide obvious? Easy to understand?
• Concise and grammatical. Is text written in concise phrases? Are bulleted phrases grammatically
parallel?