Give Great Presentations by Publishing Bloomsbury;

Author:Publishing, Bloomsbury;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Step three: Decide on the right visuals

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say – and it’s certainly true that a verbal message that is reinforced with a visual one is stronger than the verbal message alone. So visual aids, which in this case means any sort of illustration, graphic, graph or diagram that you might want to use, are certainly an important part of most presentations.

However, there’s a problem: while a good visual gives a huge boost to a presentation, a poor one leaves it worse off than no visual at all. At best, it distracts the audience; at worst, it baffles them. So if you’re going to use visuals, it’s essential that you use them well.

Your first question, then, when planning your presentation shouldn’t be ‘What visuals do I need?’, but ‘Do I need any visuals at all?’. Here are three benchmarks to help you decide whether a visual is necessary or not:

1. Does it back up your argument? Any visual that doesn’t reinforce what you’re saying will simply distract the audience.

2. Does it clarify a tricky point? Using a picture is sometimes the only effective way to explain something complicated, for example how a machine works or how different statistics compare with one another.

3. Does it make an impact? If there is just one important message you want your audience to take away from your presentation, can it be summed up in a single image?

Step four: Design your visuals

Use pictures, not words

The best question to ask yourself when designing a visual is, ‘What does this show?’ (rather than ‘What does this say?’). In other words, use as little text as possible. If you do need to add words – labels on graphs, titles on organization charts, stages on workflow diagrams, for example – make sure:

• they’re still in a decent font size (18pt minimum, preferably);

• they’re horizontal wherever possible, for ease of reading;

• even if they have to be vertical (along the axis of a graph, for instance), the letters are horizontal.

Try some icebreakers

Sometimes it can be helpful to use a visual early on as an icebreaker that will warm up the audience and get you over the jitters. Presenters often make this a ‘funny’, which is fine, but you do need to be a bit careful: if you’re not a natural joke-teller, it can be embarrassing all round if your story falls flat. Cartoons can also do the job for you, but again, make sure the content and implications of the cartoon suit the rest of the presentation.

Titles for visuals

Too often, presenters make the mistake of putting a general label, such as ‘Sales in last quarter’ at the top of a visual. However, it’s much better to come up with a very specific label that tells people what you want them to look at in that visual. Instead, if you wrote ‘Sales in last quarter reverse previous downward trend’, your audience would know instantly why they’re being shown this slide. The key message here is: make the title of a visual the same as its message.

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