Slide Tips: Design in Presentation (by Bert Decker)

This post by Bert Decker is the second in our newly launched Slide Tips series.
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Although this series is about design in PowerPoint support – don’t go to the PowerPoints first. Design is essential. But before design comes something else. Purpose.

Garr Reynolds is an expert on presentation design – his article last week, along with his blog Presentation Zen and book of the same name, prove it. In today’s post, I’ll leave design to the expert, and focus on creating what I call a Communications Experience for your audience, whether it’s one person or one thousand. To put it all in context, here’s how to prepare for a powerful presentation:

1. Create the message: one that is listener-based, focused and with action.
2. Develop the slides that best support the message – but don’t become the message.
3. Deliver it powerfully, remembering that YOU are the presentation.

1. Create the Message

Yes, you need a message first. Unfortunately, this is counterintuitive to many business people who create slides and support material first, then add the words. In 90% of the cases, business people go to their computers and hammer out the PowerPoints in text, words and bullets – with precious few visuals, unfortunately. Or worse, they begin pulling slides from old presentations, hoping it will all come together. Then they add notes and comments that they’ll say verbally – and deliver the presentation, with little relief from the flood of information. You cannot effectively create slides without a purpose. The message comes first.

Information vs. Influence
If your purpose is strictly to inform in a presentation, with many words, text and data, go no further. Write a book. Use those words and text. Create a training manual, white paper, or essay. (All of which can, and often, take the form of a 176 slide PowerPoint deck.) This is perfectly acceptable for information-laden (often technical, and highly detail oriented) presentations. But you will be creating basically a written document, one that can stand on its own, and does not necessarily need your delivery to make it a presentation.
Unfortunately, the great majority of business presentations (of which I’ve seen over 10,000 in the last 20 years) are basically written documents that inform, but don’t influence. They don’t inspire. They don’t generate action. And they certainly are not well designed.
Think of your next presentation as an opportunity to transform information to influence. Don’t give a status quo update to your leadership team on key metrics. Call them to elevate next quarter’s performance by allocating budget to your initiative. Why would you read information from an outline when you can answer a higher calling by making that information relevant to your listener, focused and action-oriented?
To prepare your message, begin with the end in mind. With what inspiration or action will people leave the room? Three elements are essential here – and are the Cornerstones of our Decker Grid™ methodology:

1. Point Of View: The “So what?” of your message. Think of this as the one think you want your listener to remember.
2. Action: What do you want your listener to do with the message?
3. Benefit: What’s in it for them? How will your listener benefit as a result of taking your action?

2. Develop the Slides

There’s nothing wrong with continuous slides in a presentation. There are fabulous presentations, in the form of what I refer to as a narrated slide show. Instead of text, the slides are rich with pictures, graphs, videos and other emotively moving images to view. One great example is Al Gore presenting his slide show of An Inconvenient Truth – very powerful visuals and impact. Or the many moving illustrated lectures similar to those presented at the annual TED conference. (To create these amazing visuals, be sure to reference the pros like Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte.)
There are two other categories that are narrated slide shows, and use the design elements mentioned above, but have no personal presentation.

• They are Webinars and conference calls in business, that have to have continuous slides and voice, and the Slidecasts in the Slideshare website, which have sound with a PowerPoint. Although the design principles are the same, text and words may have to augment.
• And then there is the pure slide show, such as we see in the Slideshare website. Here the design is everything, and all the elements above have to be even more dramatic.

3. Deliver the Message

For in-person presentations, adding one new design element to the basics above makes all the difference. It’s YOU! Your energy, enthusiasm and confidence go a long way to carrying the message. You and the message are one, and your PowerPoints are visual support to your message – it is NOT the message itself.
One of the best examples of creating the communication experience is Steve Jobs at MacWorld. He is not giving a narrated slide show, he is the show, and he is using brilliantly designed PowerPoint (Keynote in this case) support to emphasize, dramatize, and otherwise create memory hooks.
The reason so few presentations are communication experiences is that people have come to believe that the PowerPoints are the presentation. They miss the power in the gestalt of both person and visual making impact on a listener – and thus influencing an audience.

Use Black Slides (For in-person presentations ONLY)
The secret sauce in design of support for the Communication Experience is to use black slides in your PowerPoints. A black slide is literally a black, blank background slide. Not a logo, not a design, but a nothing – simply a black slide.
Using the Black Slide concept will do three things:

• Black slides will enable you to clear your screen when you have finished one point and are telling a story, amplifying, adding a postscript, etc.
• Black slides will enable you to cross in front of the projector when you want to move around, own your space, and not have to have the projector awkwardly showing some text on your body.
• But most of all, Black Slides will release you from PowerPoint prison, where you create your PowerPoints and they become your presentation. If you create your content first, and then decide what your support visuals are going to be, it’s a different ball game. And the payoff is enormous.

We coached a CEO of a major risk management company, who had used PowerPoints in the typical way. He embraced the Black Slide concept. He wanted to make his presentations a Communication Experience. So when he gave his next speech at his company kickoff meeting, when he hit the clicker and the screen went black, people were looking around, saying “what happened to the projector?” After a very few minutes they got used to it. They concentrated on the CEO, focused on his message, and bought into his vision. They also told him it was his best presentation ever.

Consider your purpose. Consider design. And then go beyond the basics.