When you create a presentation, you want to communicate your message clearly and effectively to your audience. But how do you balance the use of visual and textual content to achieve this goal? In this article, you will learn some tips and best practices to design your slides with the right mix of images, graphs, charts, diagrams, and text.
Visual content can help you capture attention, illustrate concepts, simplify data, and evoke emotions. However, too much visual content can also be distracting, confusing, or irrelevant. Textual content can help you provide context, details, explanations, and arguments. However, too much textual content can also be boring, overwhelming, or unclear. Therefore, you need to balance visual and textual content to create a presentation that is engaging, informative, and persuasive.
When balancing visual and textual content in your presentation, there is no single formula that works for all scenarios. However, some general guidelines can help you make more informed decisions. For instance, the 6x6 rule limits each slide to six bullet points with six words each to avoid overloading slides with too much text. Additionally, the picture superiority effect suggests using relevant, high-quality, and memorable images to make your message more impactful. The data-ink ratio also encourages minimizing unnecessary elements in graphs, charts, and diagrams to focus on the most important data. Lastly, the contrast principle creates contrast between visual and textual content by using different colors, sizes, fonts, and shapes to emphasize the most important information.
To illustrate how you can balance visual and textual content in your presentation, let's look at some examples. For example, a slide with a title, a subtitle, and a large image of a mountain can be effective as it uses a relevant and striking image to capture attention and convey a message. The title and subtitle should be concise and clear, with contrast between the text and the image being strong. Conversely, a slide with a title, a subtitle, and a small image of a mountain in the corner is not recommended as it uses an irrelevant and low-quality image that adds no value to the message. The title and subtitle should also be specific and informative when using charts to show data. However, if the chart is complex and cluttered with labels, legends, colors, and percentages then this can be detrimental as the title and subtitle become generic and redundant, with the contrast between the text and the chart being low.
If you want to incorporate visual and textual content into your presentation, there are several tools that can help you create and edit your slides. PowerPoint is a popular and versatile tool that enables you to create slides with different layouts, themes, and animations. You can also add images, graphs, charts, and diagrams. Canva is a free and user-friendly tool that provides templates, fonts, and icons. Additionally, it allows you to upload and edit your own images, graphs, charts, and diagrams. Finally, Piktochart is a free and powerful tool that enables you to create slides with different infographics, maps, and reports. It also permits customization and editing of images, graphs, charts, and diagrams.
You can also buy some ready made .ppt slide templates. With slight adaptions you can make them fit into your style of presentations. Such templates give lots of inspirations. There are 1000 of providers available.
After you create your slides, you need to test your balance of visual and textual content to ensure that your presentation is clear and effective. To do this, review each slide and ask yourself if it has the right amount and type of visual and textual content. Is it relevant, high-quality, and memorable? Additionally, get feedback from someone else to determine if the slides are easy to understand, follow, and remember. Lastly, practice delivering your presentation with your slides to see how they support your speech. Do they complement, reinforce, and enhance your message? Do they capture, maintain, and influence your audience's attention?
Please also keep in mind, that people tend to either listen to your speech or read the content of your presentation. Not all information will be kept in memory from borh ways simultaneously. Therefore the presentation slides should also reinforce and highlight the messages of the speaker. Keywords and/or short sentences with the summary of what was said is key.
People tend to write everything in the slide what they think is important to understand the topic. This leads to crowded and full-loaded slides. Nobody can catch the most important details at a glance. The goal should be too use less words to transmit the key message. Another mistake is the usage of the headline field. People tend to use this field as a navigation. If the slide is in chapter "7. Treatment Behaviours" they just write exactly this in the headline field. The headline is your action title of this unique slide and should cover what this slide is about. The key fact the reader/listener can generate out of this slide.