Episode #292: Getting Your Visuals Right Part One

Today we are going to look at the proper use of visuals when presenting. Many people ask us at Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training, what should I do with preparing my PowerPoint or my key note presentation? What about the visuals? What is too much? What is too little? What is the best way to make this work for me? Well there are 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 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 and very hard to have impact. So in that particular case, I used 90 slides. I was using visual stimulation every two seconds. As I was speaking, behind me on a big screen, visuals were just hitting the audience hard, because in that five minutes, I needed to get across an image about Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training.

I used massed visual stimulation, because I didn’t have many words available to me in just five minutes, to really grab that audience’s attention with strong memorable ideas. So I was using that two seconds interval as a technique. For that particular case, it worked very well.

Generally speaking, at the start in the design stage, I usually want to use too many visuals, because I am too greedy seeing all of these great slides I can show people. I want to show them, but I really have to pair them down. I have to really discipline myself to cut them out. It is painful. “Oh, I really want to use that graph”, “Oh that’s a great visual”. No, no, no, no. 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 visual complexity on slides. 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 them 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 for a small audience. A big venue is less intimate. From down the back of the hall, you are a tiny, remote figure standing there on the stage. The audience is more easily fixated with what is going up on the slides on the big screen above the speaker.

Ask yourself, “does this visual back up the content of what I am saying? How much time have I got to prepare?”. Where I think a lot of people make a mistake is they put all the time into the slide production and no time is spent on the rehearsal.

So the whole balance flips. Instead of getting the presentation structure and content right and then spending time on the rehearsal, all of the time is sucked up into the visuals logistics. Be very cautious about spending all your time on creating slides and not allowing enough time on the actual physical standing delivery practice. And finally the cost. Sometimes there might be a cost to buying visuals which have copyright. 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. The less you have up there the better, because people look at it in two seconds, they’ve got it and then they come back to you. Which is where you want them.

Let me talk about the new two second rule. Attention spans are so micro today. If you are putting something up on a screen and an audience cannot understand it within two seconds, it’s probably too complicated. Think about reducing down the volume or breaking it into a couple of parts and put these on different slides. Maybe just leave it out and replace it with something you can talk to. Don’t make people work 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.

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 is easier 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 have a lot of additional fancy work can be distracting. Be 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 strategically and very practically to make a strong point. Upper and lowercase is much more balanced.

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

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. Or sometimes maybe have it all up on the screen at one time.

If you are going to have animation, where it might be wipe left to right for example, as you bring in something, then have it wipe right all the time. Don’t have one wipe right, then another wipe up and the next one is wipe left. It’s very confusing for an audience.

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 on to another page.

Pictures have a lot of visual appeal and as we say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Very simply, in two seconds, the audience have got it. Now they’re ready for your words to talk about the relevancy of this visual image to what your talk is about today.

In a few weeks’ time, in Episode #295, we continue with Part Two of the correct use of visuals and look at graphs, colours, room lighting and some technical nightmares to avoid.