Posted on 7 Comments

Insight for the day: less is more, also for slides

Did you realise that… having fewer slides for a presentation actually is more difficult than having lots of slides?

Difficult in the sense of more work also… and I notice that most speakers are lazy; hence you get to see slideshows where people read from their own slides slower than you do. So I always wonder what such speakers are actually doing there… if I get those slides anyway, they’re not adding anything, are they? Perhaps someone could record it and make a podcast, but no need for the audience, really.

I have a few talks that are less than 10 slides, including first and last pages. I always use the first page to introduce the topic, my name and such, and possibly the event – and no, I don’t even need to look back at my own slide when I say “hi, I’m Arjen…” 😉 The last page wraps things up asking for questions and such, possibly some more contact info and resource links.

Such a small deck of slides is good for a 45-60 minutes session, easily. They merely illustrate what I’m saying. I “make up” what I say on the spot, based on prior sessions and any feedback from the audience. For some talks I have some notes that I hold in my hand (I like to move around while talking). Of course, the more I do a presentation on a certain topic, the more slick the session will be 😉

Sessions with some code examples may need more slides, but again it depends on what the purpose of the slides is… will the code actually provide more insight in the topic during the talk? Will the attendees get a copy anyway? Could it be a separate handout, or could they just get a URL to get the code? Lots of options there.

Generally, I reckon the old rule of about “1 slide per 5 minutes” still holds.

Posted on 7 Comments

7 thoughts on “Insight for the day: less is more, also for slides

  1. Hi,

    I liked one guys (Guy Kawasaki) rules for presentation. You might like it too: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html

  2. I totally agree. In grad school I had a professor who made us all give presentations, but he went over our slides with us in meetings. He kept saying, “there’s too much on this slide.”

    1 slide per 5 minutes is a great rule. But there are other important rules:

    Less than 5 bullet points per slide.

    Bullet points should be key phrases that remind you of what you want to say. Nobody should be able to get your slides without the accompanying talk and know what they’re talking about. This isn’t to keep it a secret, it’s that if your slides are self-explanatory, people will feel their time is wasted — your 2nd paragraph.

    I definitely keep notes if a keyword isn’t enough, or I worry I’ll think “yeah, I remember that, but what did I want to say?”

    Most of the time code samples just serve to confuse. Code samples should be done more like web tutorials are, where you have a snippet of code, explain it, and then at the end put the snippets together.

    I also like to do demonstrations, where I type a query or code and explain it AS I’m typing it (of course, the actual query/code is in my notes so I get it right before I hit return). It’s much more memorable to construct a query and say “Because the subquery uses a table in the outer query, it’s a correlated subquery”.

  3. Absolutely. A slide can provide one sentence headings for about 2 paragraphs of discussion or examples which illustrate a concept (“here’s the code” or “here’s the network map” or “here’s the dependencies” etc).

    What really sends me around the bend is speakers who simply repeat, to the word, what they have on the slide. They may as well not say anything… Just click through the slides, one every fifteen seconds or so.

    I suppose it’s valuable for deaf people….

  4. Hey Arjen,

    Don’t get too caught up with presentation rules. I just gave a well-liked session that had 30 slides for 15 minutes of presentation.

    I find that practice is much more important than the number of slides – if I practice a session, it tends to go well. If I don’t, well… let us not speak of LinuxTag 2002. :^)

  5. Of course. It’s a guideline, not a rule.

    So, what was that 15 minutes presentation about, and did you actually need those 30 slides (i.e. they didn’t contain your speaker notes, etc) ?

  6. The presentation was on the new licensing scheme for eZ publish.

    I needed the slides to help ensure that the audience got the exact details (guarantee periods, prices, names, etc.) for the licensing scheme right.

    Most slides had a single point or a title and a few points on them – I could have had many less slides with more bullet points, but then peoples attention tends to wander over the points on the slide that you haven’t covered yet.

  7. […] week I scribled some thoughts on presentation slides, and got some very good comments. Thanks! One comment referred to Guy Kawasaki and something he […]

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