How to Create Good Slides

Suppose that by now you have your story as an outline or as a mind map, or maybe just written as
plain text. What’s next? Now you get to the slides. This is the process that I typically follow:

        1. Reproduce the story in your presentation software—PowerPoint, Keynote, or whatever
you are using: One slide per message, text only.

       2. Decide what you want to see on the slides on a very basic conceptual level: Text or
visuals? What kind of visuals? Some people sketch their slides on paper at this stage. I
don’t, but only because my drawing skills are terrible and my Keynote skills are very
good, so it makes more sense for me to sketch in Keynote, or a similar program.

      3. Define the overall style for the presentation: Colors, fonts, backgrounds, textures, and
so on.

      4. Finalize the slides: Draw the diagrams, find the pictures, place the text, and so on.


Before you get to the process, however, I want to address one very important question first: Why
design slides at all? Why can’t you just say what you need to say and be off? Why spend hours tinkering
with fonts and line widths when this time could be spend on other worthwhile activities?

There are four functions for the slides, four reasons why they are well worth your time.
(There may be more, but these are the most important.)

First of all, slides are used to remind the speaker what to say next. If they are passed to
the audience after the talk, they also remind the audience what the speaker said. Text
slides usually do this job well enough.

Second, slides impress. As you know, images have a bigger impact than words, and they
are more memorable. That is why people sometimes use photographs and drawings to
illustrate their points.

The third function of slides is to explain, so diagrams are used to simplify complex processes,
relations, and so on.

The last and the most important function is to prove. There are many types of evidence—
of which statistical data is probably the strongest. We use data visualizations to make
comparisons and draw conclusions.

The figure at the left illustrates different functions and different types of slides. These are just
examples, all the possible slide types simply won’t fit into one diagram, but I hope you get
the general idea. This is yet another way to look at the process of creating your slides. First
you come up with a message, and then you decide what you need in order to communicate it successfully. Decide what the slide will do: remind, impress, explain, or prove. Then come up
with a concept of a slide, and finally with the slide itself.