Think billboard
Limited text. Powerful & pertinent imagery.
Viewing your slides as billboards along the highway is one of the best approaches you can take when it comes to PowerPoint slides. You drive along and glance at a huge billboard with two foot high lettering and big images. It takes 2 seconds to look at it, and you get the message right away.
80 – 20 – 10 Rule
We tend to remember only a small percentage of what we hear, a slight increase for what we read and much more what we see. I’ve seen (as I remember the graph) this called the 10-20-80 rule. That would be like someone telling you about the winning goal in a soccer match. Would you remember? Now if you read about the same goal in the paper, you might be able to relate the information back to someone else. And, if you had actually seen the goal, you could describe it, as well as how the audience and players reacted, the result it would have in league standings, the stats for the player…
My website is full of slide sorter screen grabs from different clients. Some have adopted this approach, many have not. Viewing your slides in slide sorter view gives you a good idea if you have achieved visual impact. Here is a before and after screen grab to give you an idea of what I’m talking about. A quick look at the revised slides give you a visual idea of the topic. Chips cards – paperwork – sick people – medical records – ambulances, hospitals, x-rays – Doctor’s office – pharmacy – smart card readers – fingerprint ID – chip cards. A much better idea than sleepy text slides!
If your goal is IMPACT and RETENTION then you might want to modify your approach to populating your slides. You must still refine your words for your presentation, but please, put these in the “notes” version in PowerPoint and use that screen space for something effective.
Richard Mayer in his book “Multimedia Learning”, stresses the power of mixing images and text.
Nancy Duarte writes about this as well in her book “Slide:ology” She makes quite the case. Recommended reading.
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