Reading time: 2.5 minutes.

I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time watching presentations.

Business presentations.

Portfolio presentations.

Webinars.

Design presentations.

Recordings of lectures on Youtube.

And a lot of them are…

Well, good isn’t a word I’d use to describe them. 

Most people don’t know how to design presentation slides.

Even designers! 😳

Today we’re going to fix that.

Have you seen this TED talk?

The TEDx talk How to Avoid Death by PowerPoint has racked up 4.9 million views on YouTube.

It’s still as relevant today as it was when it came out in 2014.

The speaker, David JP Phillips, lays out 5 guiding principles you can use to make your presentations more memorable and more effective.

Let’s dive in.

Principle 1: One Message at a Time

Ever see a presentation slide with more than 1 idea or message on it?

Here’s an example:

There are two different messages on this slide:

1. The project background
2. The problem statement

People are easily distracted.

If you’re presenting a slide like this one, chances are high that your audience is thinking about message 2 while you’re still making important points about message 1.

Or vice versa.

Make it easy for your audience to absorb your message by removing distractions and focusing on one message at a time.

Principle 2: The Redundancy Effect

A common mistake: The presenter shows a passage of text on the screen and then reads it to the audience.

The Redundancy Effect tells us that people are less likely to absorb information if it’s being presented in multiple formats at the same time.

The audience is reading the text on the slide—a visual format.

The presenter is speaking the words to them at the same time—an auditory format.

Not only is the audience getting bored, but they’re also not going to digest or remember the information the speaker wants them to have.

Instead, design your slide so it's a visual aid for what you’re saying verbally.

Use images and bite sized pieces of text to deliver your message effectively.

Principle 3: Size

We pay more attention to objects if they’re bigger than whatever else is around.

Where is your attention drawn in the image below?

Use this principle to guide your audience’s attention to the most important elements on the slide.

David JP Phillips challenges the status quo by saying slide content is more important than slide titles—so the titles should be smaller. 

Principle 4: Contrast

Objects with a high degree of contrast stand out and get our attention.

You can use this principle to focus your audience on a certain element on your slide—instead of overwhelming them with everything all at once.

This works great when you want to draw attention to one part of a whole, like this example:

Which object is your eye drawn to?

Principle 5: Counting

What’s the right number of objects to show on a single slide

Good question!

Look at the 3 slides in this sequence:

This works great when you want to draw attention to one part of a whole, like this example:

The first has 10 objects and takes an average of 2 seconds for your brain to process and count them.

The second has 7 objects. This took you about 1.2 seconds.

And the third has 5 objects—and only took 0.2 seconds for you to process them.

It takes your brain 500% more time to process 7 objects than it does to process 5 objects.

But here’s the real kicker:

The slides with 10 and 7 objects both require you to count.

But the one with 5 is much easier. You don’t need to spend time on the cognitive process of counting.

You just see that there are 5 objects.

Less objects on your slide = faster cognition = better retention of info = better presentations

David JP Phillips recommends no more than 6 total objects per slide. And that includes things like titles, page counts, anything at all!

That’s it for this week.

I hope these principles help you design better slide presentations.