Some tips for creating useful presentations

how-to.md

How I Create Presentations (sometimes)

I've spent a fair amount of time creating presentations, especially technical and semi-technical presentations in the field of software development. These are some of the strategies I typically employ for doing so.

1. Start with a narrative. I don't create slides initially, I write it out in prose, often using something like Dropbox Paper. I write it basically like I hope it will sound when I do present it; a presentation should sound natural, it shouldn't sound like you're working your way through slides. Remember, your slides are visual aids: you are the presentation, people came to hear you talk. If you're just going to read off of your slides, you might as well just share the slides and skip the presentation all together. So write it like you're delivering a monologue, not like you're reading through a stack of flash cards.

2. Read through your narrative. If your narrative doesn't sound good, your presentation won't sound good. It doesn't mean your presentation will be the narrative verbatim, but it's a starting point, and if your starting point is bad, you're ending point probably will be, too. Read it for correctness, completeness, tone, and feel.

3. Create your slides. Next I just go through my narrative from top to bottom and start creating slides to hold the content. I'll copy a paragraph from my narrative into the notes of a new slide, and then decide what kind of visual aid this content needs, if any. Now I'll be thinking about the presentation, the flow and the timing, as well as my ability to keep my place in the notes. For this reason, I'll frequently split up a single paragraph across multiple slides, even if those slides are all identical. The audience won't notice that you're changing slides, but you'll as the presenter will have just a small piece of your notes to deal with.

   A fair number of my slides are blank except for my notes. These are times when I want the audience to focus even more on what I'm saying, and I don't feel like there is a useful visual aid. I don't want to just tack this on to my previous slide because that's not the content I'm talking about anymore.

   In other cases, my slide will just have a single main point in large text: one sentence, terse, but more-or-less grammatical (because people don't like trying to read something that's clumsy, they'll tend to try to auto-correct it in their head anyway and it will only make it harder and more distracting).

   For lists of items, I always step through the list one at a time. As a general rule, I don't want anything on the slides to distract from what I'm talking about right at this moment; if you tip your hand by revealing the future items on the list, you're audience isn't going to wait for you, they're going to skip ahead and read what's there instead of listening to what you're saying. On the other hand, keeping the previous items of your list can be helpful to provide an indicator that you're still in the same list, still talking about the same general thing. But they shouldn't be distracting: fade your previous items (and slide heading if you have one) with a subtle font color that's a bit closer to your background color than your normal text is. Additionally, specifically highlight your current item with your highlight color and an obvious text decoration (bold, italics, or underline, for instance). If you find that you have some kind of summary of conclusion to give at the end of your list, bring the entire list back up on a slide with normal foreground font and color (not your subtle text and not your focused/highlighted text). For what it's worth, I don't attempt to do this with built in animations in tools like Google slides or Microsoft PowerPoint, I just create a slide with the entire list on it, then duplicate it once for each list item and strip out and format each copy as needed.

   Diagrams are great for slide decks as long as they're meaningful, and not too complicated. High level only, don't try to provide every detail in a single diagram that people are going to be viewing from twenty feet away. All the same rules about visibility (size, color, and contrast) apply to diagrams, they aren't magically exempt. Additionally, for anything but the simplest diagrams, it might be useful to build it up piece by piece, with a new slide to add a new piece to the diagram and explain what it is.

4. Rehearse and refine Go through your slide deck from beginning to end. Don't skip things, don't rush through them, treat it as a dress rehearsal. Time yourself. Record yourself. This is your chance not only to practice it and get more comfortable presenting it, but also to find anything that doesn't sound good, look good, or flow well. If you can find one or two people who are willing to help, going through it in full to another person, after you're done with your own editing, can help you catch a lot of stuff you're too close to recognize.

presentations.md

• Give yourself time to prepare - Good presentations take a little bit of time, so don't plan to be putting it together the night (or morning) before your presentation. If you can target completing your presentation a week in advance, this will give you a few days to overshoot your deadline, a few days to polish and refine it, and a few days to practice it.
• Practice - Plan to run through the presentation 2 or 3 times on your own (or even with a small audience) in advance. This will help you get comfortable with it so you can present more naturally and comfortably. It will also gives you a chance to check and adjust the timing or find any rough spots that need to be polished. If you practice in front of one or two other people, they can give you some critical feedback as well, about areas that need some work or clarification.
• Relax, it's normal to be nervous, almost everyone is nervous, because public speaking is nerve racking. So don't feel bad about being nervous.

Tips for Slide Decks

I strongly recommend this 20 minute TED Talk: "How to avoid death by PowerPoint". It has some really good basic ideas that are easy to implement that can have a dramatic positive impact on your presentation. Here are some of the takeaways:

• No more than 6 objects on a slide.
• Use contrast to focus attention (e.g., highlight the point you're talking about, fade the rest).
• Avoid putting sentences on the screen, but if you have one, don't talk while the audience is reading it.
• YOU are the presentation, the slides are just a visual aid: use a dark background and keep attention on yourself.
• Large objects draw attention; the headline is not the important part of your slide, it should be smaller than the body.
• No more than one message per slide

Formatting For Readability

Keep in mind that you will typically be presenting with a projector to a large room. Also keep in mind that your audience has varying levels of vision, including color vision.

Font Size

Assuming the display itself is appropriately sized for the room, then text should be no smaller than 1/36 of the vertical size of the display. This should be considered small text for your presentation; it will generally be visible to the audience but it will require some effort to read, so avoid having too much of this, especially on the same slide (which will likely indicate that there is too much packed into one slide anyway). On a typical 1920x1080 display this works out to be 30 pixels which is typically a 22pt or 24pt font size (this assumes a typical 96dpi display setting).

Medium sized text is considered to be between about 1/29 and 1/19 of your vertical size. On a 1920x1080 display this is about 37px to 55px, and at 96dpi this is a 28pt to 42pt font size.

Large text should be used for main points. Large text will often be alone on a slide. If it's not alone on a slide, it will typically either be overlaying a background image, or will be lightly annotated with small text. Large text is considered anything larger than 1/14 of your vertical screen size. On a 1920x1080 display this is about 76px, which is a font size of 58pt or larger at 96dpi.

The following table summarizes recommended font sizes for a 1920x1080 display at 96dpi (typical):

Text Size	Font Size Range	Use
small	22pt - 24pt	Limited and sparingly. Annotations, labels, and captions.
medium	28pt - 42pt	Bullet lists, sentences (sparingly)
large	>= 58pt	Main points, a single text segment that is the focus of the slide

Consistency

Humans generally like consistency, and even if the person doesn't, their eyes and brain do: any difference in the way text is displayed (size, font face, color, etc) will generally be interpreted as implying a semantic difference. If this is not what you intend, don't do it. If it is what you intend, there are better ways to do it than slight variations in font size.

So for each type of text describe above (small, medium, and large), pick one font size and go with it. E.g., even though we consider anything between 28pt and 42pt to be medium text, that doesn't mean you should use this entire range: pick something in this range that works and use it exclusively. At a minimum, you should apply this rule to each slide. Ideally, it would apply at a larger scale, like the entire deck, or at least an entire section of the deck.

Font Color and Highlighting

In the theme of consistency, it is generally advisable to avoid using too many different colors on a slide, or even within a presentation, to avoid visual clutter. In particular, using colors to represent different meanings (e.g., highlighting or other color coding) is problematic for anyone with color-blindness. Keep in mind that there are many different degrees and types of color-blindness so just avoiding red and green, for instance, is not sufficient to avoid problems.

Instead, try to pick a single color to act as a highlight throughout your presentation. This color should be high enough contrast to your standard text color (and your background color) that it will still be easily differentiated in a gray-scale rendering.

It is often a good idea to also use a non-color based cue for highlighting, such as font-weight or style (italics or not), or text decorations (such as underline). Avoid using quotation marks as highlighting since quotations are generally understood to indicate quoted text, aliases, or sarcasm.