If you think presentations cannot enchant people, then you have never seen a really good one.1
—Guy Kawasaki, chief evangelist of Canva
Think for a moment on all the talks you have watched. Can you remember one without presentation slides? That’s quite rare. What about you? When is the last time you gave a talk without slides?
Presentation slides are a ubiquitous tool many presenters use. This is why—if we’re going to use them—let’s do it the right way. This chapter gives you some basics and also explores in depth the presentation hacks from successful speakers in the tech arena.
Do I Always Need Presentation Slides to Speak?
The quick answer is: no. But slides can be useful and effective tools if they are designed and presented well. This book will not debate if you should use presentation slides or not, but will give tactical advice for using them effectively. Let’s focus on how slides can become a magic tool instead of a burden.
Design Well and Present Well
Let’s analyze the two main phases of using slides for your talks: design and present. Put in a different way: before the stage time and during the stage time.
Design Your Presentation Slides
- 1.
Start with pen and paper. One of the biggest mistakes in creating slides is simply opening PowerPoint and starting to fill a blank slide. Doing that will limit your creative process. Instead, grab a pen and paper and put your ideas there. Make notes, draw sketches, scratch them, create a structure, and decide on your stories and examples. Only when you have the content organized in your notes, go to the computer or tablet and use the tool to capture your ideas onto slides.
- 2.
Build a storyboard. A good practice that expands on the previous idea is organizing your talk as a storyboard. The concept of storyboards has been used for decades in creative disciplines such as movies, comics, TV series, and commercials. More recently, it has become commonplace in designing games and front ends for websites and apps. Storyboards consist of a series of panels or boxes, in which each contains one drawing and optionally some text, all as a sketch. So you can similarly draw sketches of every idea you have in mind, and once you organize them in a logical sequence the storyboard is done. Once the storyboard is ready, you can open the presentation software and create the slides. Any modern presentation software will allow you to capture your ideas once your storyboard is well-crafted.
- 3.Use a presentation template. Do you remember yourself creating several slides, one by one, trying to keep some style, and later when you decided to change that style you had no choice but manually editing every single slide? That manual, mundane work is unnecessary. Most presentation software tools have the concept of a template. Invest a bit of time and learn how to use templates. In PowerPoint, you can find the Slide Master feature for using and editing templates (see Figure 8-1). Use templates to ensure consistency on the style across your slides and to save valuable time. As a result, you can funnel that saved time into creativity.
Figure 8-1Slide Master. View of a template in PowerPoint
- 4.
Keep every slide simple. Busy slides are the past and have been largely criticized with reason. Your goal should be: one picture per slide, one phrase per slide, one graph per slide.
- 5.
Beware of copyrights. Today, many talks will be livestreamed or video-recorded to be published later. Make sure every image you use is copyright cleared. Use your own photos whenever possible as that will make your visuals more unique and will have a personal touch. If not, find copyright-free images in sites such as Unsplash,2 Wikimedia Commons,3 and others.
Present Your Slides
- 1.
Find the best spot to stand. Especially in small events oftentimes your speaking area is limited by the location of the screen and the table or podium. Take some time to find the best spot and the areas in which you will move with comfort. Consider that you need to be able to see the laptop or monitor as you’re not facing the big screen. Also, make sure you’re not in the middle of the projector’s beam and the screen. Arriving on time to the venue will allow you to make arrangements if needed such as moving tables and reconnecting equipment.
- 2.
Use a clicker. If you’re on a small event, you will likely present from your own laptop, and even though the “stage” is small, using a clicker will give you freedom of movement. With this freedom you can move closer to the audience, or jump between showing slides and whiteboarding, all with ease. In the bigger conferences you will not be allowed to present from your own laptop so the stage manager will give you a clicker. Make sure you get familiar with that type of clicker you’re given: practice a few minutes until your mind knows well where each button is.
- 3.
Test both audio and video. If you need to play audio or video, test them in advance. For videos, the best thing to do is download them and embed them into the presentation so you don’t rely on Internet connection. There are tools that allow you to do that, such as youtube-dl.4 For audio, not only test that it works but make sure the volume level set is loud enough for your audience to get the message you want them to hear.
- 4.
Never present someone else’s slides. One day you will be asked to replace a speaker on your company or team, and you will be told “Don’t worry, the slides are ready, you just have to present.” This is a formula for failure, and you should avoid it at all costs. If timing is really tight, at least practice the presentation a couple of times so you will fully review the material and make some of your own adjustments. One of the worst things that can happen is that a folk in the audience asks you “what does this phrase written there mean?” and you have no clue.
Presentation Hacks from the Masters
Now you know the basics of presentation design and delivery, it’s time to learn less-known hacks from the pros in the tech arena. These advanced tactics will make your presentations even more effective and outstanding.
“New.PPT” by Mikko Hyppönen
Constantly collect screenshots of interesting things that can be used for your future presentations. For instance, when you read, hear something in a podcast, or see an interesting tweet and suddenly feel, Hey, that’s good, that’s a good point, take a note of that even if you have no idea if you can use it in your talks. Have a place on your phone for taking notes. Hyppönen has a slide deck on his computer called “New.PPT” which has grown to gigabytes. So when you see something interesting, make a screenshot, copy/paste, and save it.
When the time comes and you need to prepare material for a new presentation, open “New.PPT” and look at your notes on your phone. You will find a lot of unrelated things, but you could also find the right, hard-to-find piece of content you were looking for. For instance, when you want to show what, for example, a hacked website of a travel agency looks like, you will have a screenshot right there because you saved it six weeks ago when the site was still hacked.
Saving things for yourself to use when you need to make new material is useful. As you will always need to update or create new material, you will have good material ready to use.
“Create As a Comedian” by Mikko Hyppönen
Like many speakers, once Hyppönen creates new material, he reuses part of it for several events. However, at least twice a year he makes a slide deck completely from scratch. Hyppönen listens quite a lot to stand-up comedy, which he recommends to everybody as it can teach you a lot. In interviews with stand-up comedians, many have shared that they do a show, and then they repeat the show with basically the same jokes for six months or so. Then, they throw it in the trash and build a completely new show which doesn’t recycle anything. Comedians do this for multiple reasons, partially for their own sanity, and partially because people come back to see their shows. They won’t come back in two months, but they might come back in six months or in a year, and if they see a new show, they are happy. Create as a comedian. Twice a year, create all-new slides completely from scratch.
Needless to say, there are exceptions. Some stand-up comedians have jokes that people want to see repeated. It’s like the Rolling Stones playing the same songs for decades, or like Hyppönen himself carrying a floppy disk with him onstage for ten years. Both are still demanded.
“Break Up the Bullet Points” by Kevlin Henney
Kevlin Henney is an independent consultant, speaker, writer, and trainer on software development. He uses one quote, one image, one piece of code, or one diagram per slide, trying to keep it really simple. He knows that you may go through a lot of slides, but each slide has one story and one point to make. So if in the process of creating your slides you find yourself using bullet points, that’s immediately a warning sign for you. You need to break it up to more than one slide, or you need to differentiate somehow. Ask yourself, Do people need to see this or is this just something I’m going to say?
Henney knows that we go to a lot of talks where there is nothing technically wrong with the information speakers show, but when we see a lot of bullet points we feel overwhelmed and have the impression that the speaker is out of touch. Break up the bullet points.
“Show Code with Context” by Kevlin Henney
Showing code is common in technical conferences. It can be powerful, but it’s always tricky to make it right. Often the problem is just a small font. Speakers want to show code and tend to put a lot of code. The problem is that they’re showing a lot of it to fit it all on one screen, and that gives no choice but choosing a very small font size.
Henney has the idea of adjusting. Adjust your story a little bit, acknowledge that all the code is relevant, but for this, you just need to show your audience a small bit rather than showing everything all at once.
A second approach is to break up the code, so tell a story, slide by slide. First, show all of the code in one slide, an overview slide. And then on the next slides, zoom in showing an excerpt of code in a larger font. With this approach, your audience sees a lot of code as a bigger picture, and then you explain the context and emphasize that the key idea is in the smaller excerpt of code.
“Skip Slides on the Fly” by Kevlin Henney
Henney has learned to finish his talks much more on time than he used to. He recommends we use the presenter mode, where what you see on your laptop is not what people will see on the screen. What they see on the screen is the extended desktop, the second desktop. On your primary desktop, have a clock. By doing this you will have the ability to navigate to other slides. Many people don’t realize how many bits you have skipped. People will think you are moving to the next slide but actually, you’ve just skipped 10 slides in your head. You’ve already worked out that you won’t be able to cover them, they’re almost optional, but you can easily control it. Whereas if you present exactly your screen, you don’t get that control. This is a useful secret.
Additionally , never use slide numbers because if you put numbers on your slides, people can see where you skip them. Don’t enumerate your slides. Otherwise people will notice and think Hey, wait a minute. He just went from slide 23 to 30. For Henney, skipping slides on the fly is like a DJ mixing things. The speaker is in charge of that. Henney thinks that sometimes when you give a talk, there is an element of a live show, and sometimes you emphasize a particular aspect, possibly longer than you intended to. It’s possible that you’re in the middle of a talk and now you have a different way of looking at things. You can then change the content that will be more appropriate for the moment, and simply skip five slides of another topic. So, there is a dynamic element.
“Slide Velocity” by Kevlin Henney
Another useful skill, especially as you start to give more talks, is to know your slide velocity. If you’re using slides, on average how long do you spend per slide?
If suddenly you’re concerned about time, this gives you the right order of magnitude and you suddenly realize, Oh, I’m supposed to speak for 30 minutes, but if I look at my slides that will still take me one hour, clearly that’s wrong. Slide velocity is a matter of awareness. It’s like when driving: How fast am I going? What’s my typical speed?
“What If I Am Showing the Wrong Slides?” by Elisa Heikura
Elisa Heikura is a Finnish communications specialist and a coach who wants to make the life of developers and other tech-oriented people so much better—or even easier. One time, Heikura was giving a talk. After about five or ten minutes, she felt that there was something weird on the slides. Some of the data was wrong and she was correcting it while speaking. She realized that she had absolutely the wrong set of slides. What would you do in that situation?
Well, she apologized and informed her audience that she had accidentally chosen the wrong slides from two months ago. So she immediately escaped Keynote and switched the slides. In the meantime, she gave her audience an exercise to interact with the person sitting next while she found her correct slides. They switched their attention away from her until she was ready to continue.
Remember that we are human. Accept that not everything is always perfect and situations like these can happen. Your audience wants you to succeed and will be with you.
Beyond Presentation Software
This section will tell the stories of two speakers who give presentations but don’t use a standard presentation software. First, Soledad Penadés made her own bespoke code to use the web browser to present slides. Second, Horace Dediu uses Perspective app along with his data visualization mastery to create what he calls cinematic presentations.
The Web Browser Is My Presentation Software
In many talks, Soledad Penadés hasn’t used any presentation software to make her slides. The browser was enough for her. Penadés motivation to do it was embedding graphical and audio material that Keynote would not allow her to do. In the end, as a passionate coder, she got her hands dirty and built the whole thing herself.
Penadés made two versions. The first was called “minimally viable slide deck”5 and is based on HTML and CSS. With some simple text and paragraphs, the browser parses that on when you load the slides. The speaker just presses the arrow keys on the keyboard to move to the next or previous slide. The second version, called mindblown.js,6 was similar, but it would allow you to have all the content in one large website with slides, while also creating 3D content. Both pieces of software are open source, so if you are interested you can look at the code and try it for yourself.
The World Isn’t Ready for Cinematic Presentations
Horace Dediu thinks that the world isn’t quite ready yet for cinematic presentations. Dediu presented workshops to teach people how to use Perspective tool, and within those workshops, he explained that whereas the movie industry went from black and white to color, it went from no sound to sound, it went from back projection to green screen, it went from computer-generated graphics and special effects, and now it’s using virtual world, as far as presentations are concerned, we’re still where the projector was, which gave us the word slide, which was from 1960. Dediu says that we are exactly where we were in the famous scene in Mad Men when the Carousel projector was first introduced and they talk about how to advertise it. The word slide comes from the Carousel projector from Kodak which allowed you to project a still photograph, not a negative but a positive color image onto a screen and that is like photography really, showing still photographs. For some reason, even though we ended up with laptops, even though we ended up with tablets, even though we have moved from projectors to LCDs, even though we moved from low resolution to super high resolution, we still have the concept of slides as far as what stands behind a presenter.
As an analyst, as a technology person, Dediu wonders why we can’t move forward in the way the visuals are used to support the presenter because if you really have great visuals, the presenter becomes much more comfortable. The presenter becomes much less important in the sense of people judging what’s going on because they’re just mesmerized by what’s on the screen. That shifting of power away from the presenter to the presentation has yet to appear, whether it’s in corporate conference rooms or whether it’s on the biggest presentation on stage anywhere in the world. We haven’t gotten away from photography. We’re still images, not cinema. Dediu feels it’s perplexing to understand why we can’t evolve given the immense technology we have available now.
If you’re interested in cinematic presentations, have a look at Perspective7 app and the Airshow Network.8 My chapter “Dataviz” in this very book tells stories of how Dediu creates cinematic presentations.
Key Takeaways
Slides are not required for every talk and every speaker, even in the tech arena. But if used effectively they can be a valuable tool, as many speakers have shown.
Where do you start? Start with a pen and paper, and build a storyboard.
When you have your presentation slides ready, focus on finding the best spot to stand, master the use of a clicker, and pay attention to the audiovisual technicalities to ensure your success.
Always learn from the masters’ best presentation hacks.
If you feel that standard presentation software is not for you, you can use the browser to present slides, or explore the world of cinematic presentations.