We are starting a series of blog posts called Slide Tips - exclusive articles by the world’s leading presentation and communication experts. This post by Garr Reynolds is the first in that series.
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There are no panaceas leading to effective presentation visuals, and there are no quick fixes. But when it comes to creating more effective slides that complement the spoken words of a presenter, there is one graphic design principle that can make a huge difference if applied properly: the principle of empty space.

Emptiness or empty space (also called negative space or white space) is a key component of effective graphic design in general. Yet, as Alex White points out in The Elements of Graphic Design (Allworth Press), “the single most overlooked element in visual design is emptiness.” And this lack of attention to emptiness is one of the key causes of slides that are either ugly, ineffective, or both. Most people think of empty space—if they think of it at all—only as background, the canvas behind the text and graphic elements on a slide, the trapped space in between “the content.” Emptiness on a slide is not really something to concern ourselves with most people think. But empty space is not nothing, it is a powerful something. Empty space in your visuals can breath air into your key visual elements leading to greater clarity, understanding, and augmentation of your spoken word. When you start to view empty space as a positive element you are better able to avoid clutter by eliminating the non-essential.

Learning from the world around you

You can learn a lot about the idea of using fewer elements in a visual and using empty space to amplify your graphic by observing the visual design in the world around you. It’s everywhere. You can begin to improve your design mindfulness by reading books on graphic design as well as by the careful examination of the professional graphics around you right where you live. Graphic design is ubiquitous, especially in urban settings such as New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Tokyo, etc. but you can also find examples all around you in smaller towns too. As you commute to work or during your evening walk, begin to pay attention to the designs you observe—store fronts, advertising, posters, signs of all types, print media, and on and on. Designs that make good use of empty space will have messages—with or without text—that are easy to understand. Your eye does not wander or get confused. We notice differences. Designs that make use of emptiness often have good contrast and a clear design priority. We are not usually aware of “the design” of it, but we get the message. And the message is what it’s all about.

The land of Zen simplicity and visual clutter

Some of the best graphic design treatments in the world are done right here in Japan. And some of the most chaotic and mad examples of graphic design and communication are also right here. If you have been to Japan you know exactly what I am talking about. In Japan we have a 2000 year-old culture steeped in aesthetic appreciation and tradition juxtaposed with modern, fast-paced city centers which give one the feeling of living inside a giant pinball machine. Yet the lessons are everywhere. Below is an example from inside two department stores in my home of Osaka, Japan. Product displays in a retail space may seem to have nothing to do with presentation design, however, the importance of emptiness and removal of the non-essential can reveal itself in unusual places.

Above: This was snapped while shopping in an electronics store. We were shopping for an energy-efficient stainless steel refrigerator that would fit harmoniously with our kitchen appliances. However, while the price was easy to find, it was often hard to locate even the most basic information such as the exact size or energy consumption, etc. And it was difficult to imagine how this would actually look in our kitchen with the sea of clutter pasted over the very product we wanted to see.

Above: Here is a dining table in a furniture store just down the street from the electronics store. They get it. We need to imagine how the piece will look (and feel) in our home. The specs and details are there in a small sign, easy to find without searching.

Above: Advertising posters on trains offer good lessons as well. This poster (about 70cm wide) is encouraging passengers to take a trip to Gold Coast, Australia. Some of the type is no bigger than 10 point; I had to stick my nose to the glass to even read all that detail. Yet most people who see the poster will never be close enough to read all that detail. Good poster design should (1) be noticed, (2) be understood, and (3) be remembered (and hopefully get the viewer to take action). Posters and presentation visuals are different, but slides too must be noticed (have an impact), be understood, and help audiences understand and remember your point (or story, etc.).

In defense of the designer, this poster is a classic example of design-by-committee; the actual designer probably became no more than a computer operator with the client saying “Add this!” “Don’t forget that!” “Where’s the &^*#@! koala bear?!” and so on. Sadly, this poster resembles some design-by-committee PowerPoint slides which I have seen all too often in Japan. Often the default is: When in doubt, add more. “Slide-by-committee” is responsible for a lot of really bad PowerPoint slides everywhere in the world.

Above left: A classic poster that is painfully similar to a lot of PowerPoint slides. The designers of the poster on the right showed restraint, leaving most of the space empty.

Above: A lot of billboards which feature rich full-bleed images and a bit of text remind me of some good presentation slides. The entire “canvas” is covered by the image but the use of space, lack of clutter, and a clear focal point makes the visual easy to notice and understand in an instant. This huge billboard is across the street from the Apple Store.

Above: Here in a SlideShare deck are several examples and before/after slides that use empty space. All the slides were used to complement the spoken word in live talks.

Slide Tips is a weekly series of articles by leading presentation and communication experts.
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There are SlideShare members from all over the world - in Sudan, in Hawaii, in Sydney and Helsinki. We have been noticing how many people upload slides about their cities and countries. Generally, its a bunch of pictures and some commentary. I love watching such slideshows. Many are about places I have never been, but would really like to go. Some of them are embedded below. I hope you enjoy them as well.

Of course, we have slideshows about London!

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And how we have London, and not have Paris.

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Some city slides about Jaisalmer, golden city in the north western part of India.

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These slides were shared with love from Romania

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And here is a slideshow about Berlin

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Go to this group to check out more. And if you have a city slideshow, please do share it in the City and Country Slides group on SlideShare!

Many SlideShare users are also WordPress users. In fact, SlideShare widgets are embedded into Wordpress more than into any other social network. I am constantly amazed by the enthusiasm of the Wordpress community. Joost de Valk has made it even more easy to embed SlideShare widgets into Wordpress.org. He noticed that we offer a special embed code for Wordpress.com users. His new plugin allows Wordpress.org users to use that same embed code. Just install this plugin and then you can use the Wordpress.com embed code to embed a SlideShare widget.

Dave is known for his blog (Master of 500 hats), his conference (Graphing Social and Web2.0 Expo which he is co-chairing), and most recently the Stanford Facebook App Class (10 million in 10 weeks). Some of you might also know him from his ore that he gained fame (or notreity) for his SimplyFired campaign for Simply Hired. Dave is also an avid SlideShare user (you can see them on his slidespace here: ). My favorite slideshow from ones he has shared on SlideShare and his most recent slideshow are embedded below. I am inspired by Dave’s metrics driven approach to marketing and product development and very glad to have him on board!

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We have heard from a number of you that search is not working on the site. Thanks for letting us know. We are working on fixing it. Will post an update as soon as it gets fixed.

Thanks for your patience!

Update: 11th Dec, 23.00 hrs PST

Search is back up & running! Sorry for the trouble…it was a temporary glitch

Michael Sampson recently posted on his blog about using SlideShare to share slides privately for a conference review. We are reprinting his post below with his permission.

If you have used private sharing on SlideShare in an innovative way, please tell us about it! We are interested in your story. Add a comment below, or post to your blog and send us a link.

Michael’s post is reproduced below and here is a link to the original post.

How We Got Feedback on Slide Decks from the Advisory Board: Thanks to SlideShare.net for its Private Slide Deck Feature

Eric is back home after two weeks in Manila, with a week of that presenting at the Beyond Planning: eProductivity conference. I am yet to debrief with him on how it went, but I wanted to share something that we did in getting ready. He had about 30 unique presentations to give over the 5 days of the conference, and for the first batch of those we wanted to run the slide decks past our advisory board (we ran out of runway to do them all like this). But when there is such a diversity of topics to be covered, and a similar diversity of interest among the advisory board members, how do you decide which slide decks to send to which people? I knew in broad terms their areas of interest, but I didn’t want to limit them to just those areas if they wanted to weigh in on others. And I didn’t want to send out 20 different slide decks by email.

The solution I hit on was to set up a private, password-controlled blog under my TypePad account, and to upload all of the slide decks to SlideShare.net, ensuring that I turned on the private slide deck setting at SlideShare (a recent addition, and a fantastic one at that).

I embedded the slide deck into a blog post on the private blog, and used multiple categories on the blog post to flag the conference track (general, advanced, executive or student), the conference theme (eg, productivity methodologies, groups and teams, mindmapping, etc.), and the status of the slide deck (draft for review, or final ready to go). For example, the slide deck on how to be productive with email was flagged as “advanced track, executive track, productive email, draft for review”.

I sent out the address of the Planning Beyond Planning private blog, along with the user name and password, to the advisors, and asked them to review whatever they had interest in the moment for reviewing. For example, they could click on the “groups and teams” category in the category cloud, and see the slide decks that were available for review. They could quickly scan through the slides in the deck, thanks to the power of SlideShare, and then leave comments on the blog with recommended changes or additions. This also meant that subsequent reviewers could see the comments that others had made, and either weigh in with a “hear hear”, or give a counter perspective.

When a slide deck was presented by Eric at the conference, I updated the private blog to signal that we didn’t need any further comments–the window of opportunity had closed. This meant that I changed the status to “final ready to go”, and closed the comments on the blog post itself.

All in all, I think it worked really well, and I wouldn’t hesitate to follow this process again. And I would fully recommend that other conference advisors embrace a similar approach. Many thanks to SlideShare for the role that they played in making Eric’s conference a success!

And equally my thanks to the advisors that worked to make this such a success.
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This is hilarious! If you know of other videos, articles making fun of PowerPoint usage, add as a comment.

We have noticed in the past few days that people are manipulating SlideShare’s popularity methods to get their presentations on the front page. Using IP logging and other methods we have found that people are creating accounts, and downloading presentations hundreds of times, favoriting them or making lots of comments in order to manipulate our popularity algorithms. We are updating our popularity algorithms to better respond to such activity. It will watch out for such spurious patterns of activity and take measures to make sure you are not taking unfair advantage of the system.

We understand when you ask a friend or two to favorite your presentation. Heck, who doesn’t. But we want every presentation on SlideShare to have a chance to get to the top. The best way to get to the top is to make great presentations that people love!