one idea per slide | Tweak Your Slides

The SIMPLE design series covers my six principles for effective visual design. The first piece in this series covered the concept of simplicity in design, with a focus on a very basic truth–simple isn’t easy; it takes work. In this installment, I’ll cover the next letter in this acronym, “I,” which stands for…

Ideally, One Idea Per Slide

Years of slideument conditioning has led all of us (including me as you’ll soon see) to see our slides as a document, something that is only really complete when filled with content (text, image, clip art, chart, random animated gif). This habit means that we’ve managed to keep our slides low in number, but high in noise (and conversely, low in signal). According to Garr Reynolds, “[p]rojected slides should be as visual as possible and support our point quickly, efficiently (good signal-to-noise ratio), and powerfully. The verbal content, the verbal proof, evidence, and appeal/emotion comes mostly from our spoken word” (Source). So, in a live situation, it’s the presenter and not the slides who must carry the weight of the signal or content. Creating a content-heavy slide places the focus on the visual aid (in the worst way possible), can cause cognitive dissonance and confusion, and can damage a speaker’s credibility. As an educator, I felt the need to fill slides with as much content as possible, especially in courses I felt less than solid in or that required more lecture focus than composition and writing, particularly Latin American Humanities:

What’s wrong with this slide? Well, even when I presented information by only showing one bullet at a time, my students first had no tangible concept to attach to ideas like “universal constructivism”, and second, as John Medina discusses in his must-read Brain Rules, the mind cannot multi-task, which is exactly what we ask audiences to do when we create slideuments. Our audience must read our slides AND listen to us, which they just cannot do. According to Medina, “[r]esearch shows your error rate goes up 50% and it takes you twice as long to do things” (Source) when the myth of multi-tasking is in play. Further, as Nancy Duarte asserts in Slide:ology, slides, like billboards are “glance media”, which means that your audience should be able to process your visual story quickly and then return to listening to your awesome content.

The situation becomes even more complex when we are asked as presenters to provide our slides for publication or when we use our slides as study guides for our students. How do we keep our slides cinematic AND also communicate dense amounts of content? Reynolds has a few suggestions, including the most obvious and useful one–create a set of display slides and create a separate document with complete notes (Source). I find that doing this gives students the opportunity to use their critical thinking skills and decide what is really important or note worthy. I want to share one of my most important design epiphanies that helped me find a good balance between content and design. Keeping this idea in mind has helped me move towards truly SIMPLE Design: An Extra Slide Costs Nothing!

So, instead of placing every bit of information about Joaquin Torres-Garcia and Universal Constructivism on one slide, I can break the information up over many slides.

Have you faced the challenge of creating cinematic slides that are also content-rich? What are your great ideas for moving away from the slideument?

You’ve studied presentation design, created beautiful new presentations, and learned the ins and outs of your presentation software. What’s next? How do you grow and exercise those new design skills?

Revising a Bulleted List

One great way to do this is to revise older versions of decks you’ve abandoned for the cinematic approach to presentation design. I have several hundred presentations and versions of presentations scattered throughout two hardrives and cyberspace. I could dump these old versions or engage in nostalgic “remember when I used the ‘dancing delivery boy’ animated gif in my presentation delivery lesson?” sessions. Instead, I like to try out new techniques, typefaces, images, and design styles and continue building on the foundational principles of design by revising these decks. Revising slidedecks full of template-driven lists of bullets, clip art, and frenetic animation takes attention to just a few basic design ideas:

Less is More (From Presentation Zen Design)
One Idea per Slide (From Slide:ology)
Picture Superiority (From Brain Rules)

Let’s take this slide for example:

By remembering that an extra slide costs nothing, that less clutter actually means more design work, and that each slide can convey one simple idea best when paired with an image, you can expand one slide of bullets into several well designed aspects of one visual story. Here is a simple process to follow (process adapted from Nancy Duarte’s Slide:ology):

1. Examine your original slide and remove the clip art–no one connects to cheesy clip art. Highlight the key idea in each slide. This key idea will be the basis for each of the rest of your slide.

Choosing what is or isn’t important in a sentence isn’t easy. Ask yourself, what word can describe the subject of the sentence? This answer is your starting point to shortening your bullet.

2. Design a slide for each bullet/highlighted pair. In this example, I’ve chosen to amplify the farmer’s market theme by using three typefaces I purchased from the Lost Type Co-Op, Ribbon by Dan Gneiding, Edmond Sans by James T. Edmondson, and Highlands by Tyler Galpin. I chose 4 core colors and chose imagery that I could adapt to the color scheme and theme. See the finished product below.

The title slide for this revision presentation sets the tone for the rest of the deck.

In order for the new deck to make sense, the second bullet should actually become the introduction in the revision.

The previous example is one I created for class. However, I want to share with you an example of a slide from one of my previous decks on Universal Constructivism to show you that theory can truly be put into practice: