HOW DO YOUR SLIDES MEASURE UP?

Here are four key elements for high-impact slides:

1. Emotionally engage the audience
2. Be understandable to the audience
3. Look aesthetically pleasing
4. Create a story waiting to be told

These four elements should be the core of every slide.

Emotionally engage the audience. Having suffered through many uninspiring presentations yourself, you are well aware that, after the first five slides, many audiences wish they could leave. Each slide you show must encourage the audience's participation-either out loud or in their minds. Make them want to hear the whole presentation. Most importantly, your slides should emotionally connect with the audience. Many people make decisions based on emotion and then rationalize with the facts.

Be understandable to the audience. Each slide must be crystal clear in terms of readability and its major point. Ever heard the saying, "Perception is everything"? Your graphics need to represent your message accurately. Use design to convey the meaning of the slide and unify the presentation as a whole.

Look aesthetically pleasing. So many slides break all the rules of design. Too many are just too awful to look at. A well-designed slide has impact-the audience wants to look at it.

Create a story waiting to be told. Every presentation is a story. And every slide conveys a part of that story. With a well-designed slide, it is easy for the presenter to continue telling the story. Slides create a story when they enable the presenter to add value to what the audience sees on the screen.

DESIGNERS: WHAT TO CONSIDER WHEN DESIGNING BACKGROUNDS

Many people do not know that you can create more than one slide master in PowerPoint 2002 and 2003. Do you use this feature?

You have an opportunity to create a new company background-or maybe even several. Answer these questions before getting started:

• Will you have just a title at the top of each slide, or will the slides have both title and subheading?
• Will you show charts that fill the whole slide?
• Will you have slides with text and pictures together?
• Will you put your logo on every slide? Is that company policy? Is it really needed?
• Will you put your customer's logo on certain slides?
• Will the presentation be divided into product categories? Do you want different slide looks for each of the products? How will you carry through one central look even with different slides looks representing different products?

Once you have created several looks, ask yourself these questions:

• When I look at the slide, does my eye go to a central place? Do I have so many graphical elements that the eye keeps wandering from one to another. Don't put all these elements on one slide: a busy background with images on it, a title space that has many design elements, a logo that is very large and other design elements as well.
• Will the design make it easy for the presenter to talk and show off the key points?
• Are the color combinations attractive and bring the eye into the slide? For example, some yellows, blues, and greens really make people want to look away. Tone down the colors if necessary.

HOW PEOPLE LEARN: THROUGH CONTINGUITY
GROUPING CORRESPONDING WORDS AND PICTURES

Richard E. Mayer, professor of Psychology at UC Santa Barbara, is the author of many books on education and learning, including Multi-Media Learning. I have been showing some of Mayer's principles in my seminar Creating PowerPoint Presentations That Get Your Point Across. In the last two issues of Presentation Points, we have talked about two of his principles:

• Use words and pictures, not words alone
• Focus your material, with no extraneous information

This month we will cover Mayer's principle of contiguity:

• Present corresponding words and pictures close together on the page or screen rather than far away from each other.

For example, it is best to explain how something works along with an illustration. What does not work so well is to have a ten-minute discussion with two slides of text explaining how something works, followed by a picture. Mayer points out that many of us think that saying something twice will make your audience remember it better, but that does not prove to be the case.

Think about how you listen to someone explaining a process. Often the presenter talks with words only on the slide. As he is talking, you are trying to form a mental image of the process. After five minutes, the presenter finally illustrates the process. First, you have missed some of what he said as you tried to make your own mental image. Second, you had trouble retaining the information because you did not have an image to help you. If this is how you now show information, make it a New Year's resolution to stop separating the words from the image.This same idea applies for making a point with pictures rather than words alone. The examples below show the difference between using just words and using pictures to make a point.

Here's a very simple example of contiguity.

Here is the text alone.

Here is the first part of the message about how the library works.

Here is the second part of the message showing, by using the yellow color, how the customer's information fits into the library.

PRESENTERS
Make sure you're prepared for your next presentation.

DESIGNERS
Review your backgrounds to make sure they really work.