Presentations Skills: Look at These Eye-Popping Visuals
They did it to me again. The sponsor for one of my upcoming keynotes sent out a slide master template, asking all their speakers to use it for their slides to give the conference program “consistency.”
I have no complaint about consistency—and usually such templates are flexible and harmless enough. But this one looked pathetic: It attempted to confine us to a simple slide title and bullet points. Can you imagine such in this day and age? (Yep. I called to verify. No art. No animation. No imbedded video. No audience polling. They wanted just boring bulleted text “because it was for senior executives.” Obviously, the template had been designed by someone who’d never presented to senior executives, and nothing could change his mind. Rather than consistency, “command and control” came to mind.)
The days of creating slides with clip art and bullet points are long past.
If you want to see what’s now possible––and often expected––to convey complex information for your business presentations, technical presentations, and webinars. Take a look at these eye-popping visuals: http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/2010/10/40-creative-and-informative-infographics.html
Granted, you wouldn’t want to spend your day creating these kinds of slides for the routine briefing, but it’s nice to know what’s available and possible with today’s tools and a little creativity (okay, maybe a lot of creativity). So what are the guidelines for creating and using visuals that accomplish your goal?
Top Ten Tips for Developing and Using Visuals
1. Consider the purpose: Ask yourself these differentiating questions: Do I intend to display this visual as a slide during a live presentation? Or am I using this visual for other “static” purposes (handout, book, brochure, website)? In a live presentation, the audience has only seconds or a couple of minutes to see the slide. Can they grasp all that’s there? Do you as presenter want to compete with your visual for your listeners’ attention?
On the other hand, if you intend the visual as a “keeper,” by all means, let your creativity run wild about how much you can display on one slide. If it takes half an hour for the viewer to study your visual, that’s their choice.
2. Start with the concept: Think: What do I want to show—not what do I want to say. Far too many presenters begin with their visuals as their outline for speaking. They create slide titles for their main points, and then go back to fill in the bullet points around that skeleton. They aim to make the slides their notes as they speak. And once they’ve developed these time-consuming visuals, they have no heart to dismantle them—even when they realize that they’ve wandered off track.
Worse yet, sometimes presenters take shortcuts by pulling previously used slides from other slideshows. Never mind that the slide doesn’t quite make the right point. As long as it contains key data or a difficult-to-develop diagram, they grab it and go, with the intent to orally “make it fit” into the current presentation.
Result? A group of slides that resemble leftovers after Thanksgiving dinner: A few slices of turkey, no gravy, two sweet potatoes, way too much broccoli, and only one slice of pecan pie.
3. Simplify, don’t complicate: As you design the visual, think what can I omit, not what can I cram on the visual. “A picture is worth a thousand words” has become a cliché for good reason. The primary purpose of a visual is to replace words—to simplify ideas so that people can grasp the concept quickly. Look at your visual and ask: Does this art, verbiage, or video simplify or complicate the idea?
4. Make the message clear: No matter how “beautiful,” “creative,” or “comprehensive” your visual, if the viewer cannot understand the point, the visual fails. In our presentations workshops, I sit through presentation after presentation and see briefers show slide after slide—often, creative slides done by their communication departments. Yet when they finish their talk, the audience can’t state the “walk-away” point they were supposed to understand from the slide. Big problem.
5. Integrate: Learn to manipulate your slides. Display them when you need them and black them out (hit the “B” key, plus “Enter”) when you’re not. Never, never, never just turn on the slides and leave them displayed. If you do, the slideshow becomes the presentation, and you, merely a slide narrator.
6. Engage the viewer: Use visuals that encourage participation. For example, if you’ve ever visited a Thomas Kinkade art gallery, the associates will tell you to view the paintings by dimming the lights on individual paintings to see how the colors seem to change and create an entirely different scene and mood. Likewise, your visuals can engage by posing a question that calls for reflection, by revealing data with animation, or by using interactive polling and showing results.
7. Learn to use the capabilities of your software. As I told one client in our presentations workshop, “Your people are still using their PowerPoint® in much the same way as someone who buys an airplane and then drives it from city to city.”
8. Reduce the “noise”: Never use a special effect or feature that calls attention to the whiz-bang of the technology and diverts attention from your message. As a rule-of-thumb, use only one type of transition within a section of your slides. Never use more than three font changes within a slideshow. And avoid so many colors that your visuals look cartoonish.
9. Eliminate errors: Random capitalization, misspellings, and grammar errors create clarity problems—not to mention mar your image.
10. Use visual support, not sabotage: Finally, know when NOT to use a visual. Visuals should support what you say. They should serve to make your point clearer, quicker, funnier, more memorable. If they don’t, they create a barrier. Eliminate them.
Dianna Booher, an expert in effective communications, founded Booher Consultants in 1980. Dianna has written more than forty books in the fields of business communication and productivity. As a high-caliber keynote speaker who inspires audiences worldwide, Dianna delivers focused programs to address specific communication challenges.
Contact Booher Consultants, Inc. for additional information.
Share and Enjoy
Related posts:
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Discussion Area - Leave a Comment