Episode #120: Presentation Visuals Mastery Part One

Today we are going to look at the proper use of visuals when we are presenting. Many people ask us at Dale Carnegie, what should I do with preparing my PowerPoint or my key note presentation? What about visuals? What’s too much? What’s too little? What’s the best way to make this work for me? Well there’s a couple of things we need to consider at the very beginning.

What about the types of visuals that we need to use? How many visuals are required? Some people have very few. Some people have a lot. I once gave a five minute presentation and I used for that, I think, about 90 visuals. Now you might be thinking, 90 visuals in five minutes? Are you nuts? Well that particular presentation was a warm up to a keynote speaker. We’d sponsored the event and for that we got five minutes of stage time. Now I remember a quote from Abraham Lincoln. Something along the lines of, if you want me to give a three hour speech I can get up and give it right now. But if you want a 20 minute speech it will take me three or four weeks to prepare it. And that’s right. To give a very long speech, rambling speech is relatively easy. To give a very concise sharp speech is very tough.

Five minutes is a really tough time period in which to speak, very hard to have impact. So in that particular case, I used 90. I was using a visual every two seconds. As I was speaking, behind me on a big screen, lots of visuals were just hitting the audience because in that five minutes I needed to get something across about Dale Carnegie Training Japan.

I wanted to give some visual stimulation, because I didn’t have many words in five minutes to really get in front of that audience with very strong ideas. So I was using that as a technique. For that particular case it worked very well.

Generally speaking, I usually want to use too many visuals, because I am too greedy and I see all these great things I can show people, and I want to show them. But I really have to pair it down. I have to really discipline myself to really cut them out. Oh, I really want to use that graph. Oh that’s a great visual. No, no, no, no. Cut it out. Cut it out. Try and keep it in some sort of range that works for you depending on what the purpose of your presentation is. Degree of permanency is something you need to think about. It might be better to use a handout. It might be something that is too complex to put up on the screen.

Unfortunately you often get this. I worked in the financial sector for a number of years and had to sit through countless presentations of spreadsheets up on screens with numbers that were so tiny, the person standing next to the screen giving the presentation had no clue how to read it themselves and they would say crazy things like, “I know you can’t see this but…”. Well of course we can’t see the thing, it’s too damn small. Get those sorts of visuals in the hands of the audience, rather than try to see it on the screen.

As for the size of the audience, for a very big audience, the visuals may be more important than a small audience. Think. Does it back up the content of what you are saying? How much time have you got to prepare? Where I think a lot of people make a mistake is they put all the time into the PowerPoint or the key note or whatever it is that they are preparing and no time on the rehearsal.

So the whole balance flips and instead of having a case where you get the presentation structure, content right and then spend time on the rehearsal, delivery practice, it’s all sucked up into the visuals preparation, which is the wrong balance. Be very cautious about spending all your time on that and not allowing enough time on the actual physical stand up and deliver and practice. And finally the cost. Sometimes there might be a cost to buying visuals or sourcing visuals. That may not be something you want to do.

Here’s some guidelines for using visuals. As it was mentioned before, sometimes less is definitely best. On a screen, try to avoid paragraphs. Try to avoid sentences. If you can, single words, bullet points. Single words can be very, very powerful. Just one word or even just one number can be very very impactful. You can talk to the number, or you can talk to that word. Or just put up a photograph or a simple visual and you talk to the visual. You don’t have to crowd the screen with stuff that we can read ourselves.

What you really want is the audience to be focused on you, the presenter and not what’s on the screen. This is very critical. We don’t want the screen competing with us so the less you have up there the better, because people look at it two seconds, they’ve got it and then they come back to you. Which is where you want them. And I mention that two seconds because I believe that the two second rule is a key rule.

If you are putting something up on screen and an audience cannot see that and understand that within two seconds, it’s probably too complicated. Two seconds-that’s not long. But if it’s more than two seconds it’s probably too complicated. So think about reducing down the volume or breaking it into a couple of parts or maybe just leaving it out and replacing it with something you can talk to. Don’t try and have people try and make their way through something very complex on the screen.

Generally, the six by six rule means that again, less is best. Six words on a line. Maybe six lines maximum on a screen is good. Again, keeping it very minimalist. Six lines or less per visual is probably good. And then six words across each line probably max.

With fonts, try to make fonts easy to read. You might use for the title 44 font size, and for the text a 32. Large font so it’s easy to read if you are at the back of the hall. In terms of font types, sans serif fonts like Arial are very easy to read. Whereas serif fonts like Times, Times Roman, which has got a lot of additional fancy work done to them, can be a bit distracting. Try to use something like Arial or Sans Serif fonts that make it easy to read. And again, be very very very sparing with all uppercase. It’s actually screaming at your audience; it’s shouting at your audience when you use strong uppercase like that. You can use it. But use it very, very strategically and very practically to make a strong point. So upper and lowercase is much more balanced. Be very careful about using a lot or too much of all upper case.

For visibility, be careful about the overuse of underline. Yes you can use underline, but use it sparingly. Bold, yes you can use bold, but the same thing, occasionally. Italics, yes, but very rarely with italics because again it’s not so easy to read. You can use them but use them very, very modestly.

With things like transitions and animations, sometimes it’s good to reveal one concept at a time, because there is only one idea on the screen and then you can talk to that, so you are not competing with a lot of words on the screen. Try and keep it consistent and simple. So if you start like that then maybe continue like that.

Or sometimes maybe have it all up on the screen at one time, but try not to have it jumping around too much because then people get very confused. If you are going to have animation where it might be wipe right for example, as you bring in something, then have it wipe right all the time. Don’t have one wipe right then the wipe up and the next one is wipe left, next one is something else. It’s very confusing for an audience. And wiping left to right is good because that’s how we read. That makes a lot of sense for people.

And if we are going to indent on a visual, do it maybe just once on that page. Don’t have a sentence and a couple of words and a whole bunch of indents. Just try and keep it as simple as possible. If you’ve got that much information, whip that over onto another page.

Pictures are great. Pictures have a lot of visual appeal and as we say, a picture is worth a thousand words. And a nice, nice photograph of something that’s relevant, of a book or picture or whatever. Nice and people can look at that. Very simply, they get it. Two seconds, they’ve got it. Now they’re ready for your words to talk about the relevancy of this visual image, this picture, to what your talk is about today.

Next week we continue with Part Two of the correct use of visuals and look at graphs, colours, room lighting and some technical nightmares to avoid.