You’ve researched and followed best practices to create your event presentation. Now, take a step back and ask it this one question: what is your presentation “saying?”. Yes. I’m anthropomorphizing things a bit, but your event presentation is your partner, and it has a visual voice that should support your voice. By asking this question and thinking about the following four topics, you can reframe your slides to see them in a new light.
If your onscreen text is bloated, your audience may tune you out to read the slide. Keep what you have onscreen lean by making sure each slide is focused on a single point.
Now, examine each slide from the perspective of flow. A successful event presentation will logically move from point to point as you build your story.
Your story flow needs pacing to create moments of visual punctuation. For example, you might spend a few minutes presenting with a single slide to keep the focus on you, then shift to a series of quick slides that build momentum to your main message. It’s this pacing that helps your audience follow your message.
A graphic can be simple or complex in that it can “say” a lot or a little. Both are needed but in the right location within your event presentation. To find out if you overshot the complexity of your graphics, present them to someone unfamiliar with the points you’re making, then see if they were so focused on the graphic that they missed what you were saying. This is a clear sign that the graphics aren’t supporting you.
It’s easy to hyper-focus on a single slide, then the next, and then the next –– inadvertently creating an event presentation you didn’t plan. Asking that one simple question will give your slides and you a stronger voice.
