The marvelous author, entrepreneur, envangelist and all round nice guy, Guy Kawasaki recently posted an excerpt from his latest book “The Art Of The Start 2“, in which he lists his Presentation Checklist. These ten recommendations are great to check your presentation against.
You can view all ten here. However, I would like to expand on a few of them.
Change Your Background to black
Having your audience looking at a bright, white screen for any length of time is not good. It can be painful to the eyes, causing headaches and eye tiredness. If you audience is physically uncomfortable they are certainly not going to be paying that much attention to what you are saying. You want to make your audience comfortable (and yes, it is your responsibility), so that they can focus all their attention on you and what you are saying. So, change your background to a dark one and use light fonts.
Change all your text to at least 30 points
This is a great idea. Guy’s explanation with this point is “Now remove text until everything fits. Less. Is. More”. At least two things will happen when you make your text at least 30 points. The first is that your text will be much easier to read and second you will not be able to cram your slides with too much text, again making your slides much easier to read. One of the many problems with presentations today is that there is still far too many words on a slide. Following this rule will greatly reduce the number of words you can fit on a slide.
Reduce the number of bullets to no more than four per slide
As Guy says “if you need more than four bullets to explain something, you either need another slide or you’re saying too much.” Squeezing too many bullets onto one slide does not allow your points to stand out. They blend in to one another in your audiences mind. Keep things simple and easy to see by reducing the number of bullets to a minimum. This will give your points much greater power.
“Build” Your Bulleted lists by clicking to make each item appear
As Guy says “A build forces you to roll out a story in a step by step fashion”. I still see presenters using a long list of bulleted points and they all appear on the slide at once. The presenter goes through the list one by one and the audience reads through the list faster. Your audience’s attention is divided between your voice and reading the words on the slide. Stop this from happening by using bullets to summarise what you are saying one by one.
This is just a selection of the ten points Guy talks about. I recommend you go and read all ten and make it a habit to follow the guidelines. If you are the one in your company following these guides, it won’t be long before everyone is following you and you become the go to guy for presenting, and that can never be a bad thing.
