Quick Reminders for the PowerPoint Decks in Your Event

You were given the opportunity to organize and host an event that would gather the brightest minds in your industry. The speakers you invited will share innovative ideas with an audience eager to gain new insights. As always, they’ll be using presentation decks to illustrate their key points. To ensure that their presentations end successfully, it won’t be a bad idea to set up some reminders on how they should prepare their slides. Here are just a few tips you can share with them, via experts interviewed by Forbes:

From Jonathon Colman:

Use Big Text for a Big Impact

Guy Kawasaki’s famous 10/20/30 rule of presentation design tells us not to use any text that’s smaller than 30 points. That’s great advice, but when you need your text to pop, make it big—really big! Use type that’s over 100 points or even larger, depending on your typeface. See how I use different type sizes to make my messages stand out in this presentation.

Find a Theme, Carry it Through

A lot of speakers use photography to illustrate their ideas. So when everyone uses great photos, how can you make yours stand out and have an impact on your audience? I recommend choosing photos that all use a similar style, subject, or other theme in common. See how I made a presentation using only photos of apples—really!

From Rick Altman:

Avoid Death by PowerPoint by doing these three things

When you witness Death by PowerPoint, most of the time it is because a presenter makes these three things all the same. He wants to use his slides as handouts, he writes speeches on his slides, he reads them word for word…say+show+give = all the same.

But when presenter think about these three tenets separately, they begin to distinguish themselves from 99% of those giving presentations today. It becomes more work – you must speak without slide scripts, you must create slides and then separate handouts – but you will become so much better at each of the three tasks and your work will become more rewarding. And you give yourself an opportunity to create something extraordinary.

From Eddie Rice:

Your slides should be the supporting cast of your talk

Plan out what you will say before you create your slides and master that material before you start designing your slides. Your slides should be the “supporting cast” of your talk–not its main focus. The payoff comes in two ways: First, if something goes wrong with your presentation, you will still have a speech ready to give, and second, you be more confident as you give your talk because you will have already mastered its focus.

As we talked about in the past, a simple PowerPoint deck is the best way to give a memorable presentation. Encourage your speakers to move away from the text-heavy slides by telling them to keep their decks to roughly 10 slides. You can also suggest that they make use of different multimedia elements to emphasize key points. This will allow them to focus on their key points.