Cannonball Run: Great movie, but terrible for slide design

The year is 1963. The city is Washington, DC. It's 6 pm on the last Thursday in May.

And my dad is preparing to do what any college kid would do after taking his last exam...he's driving home for summer break.

If Spotify had existed in 1963, Radar Love would have been featured prominently on his playlist for the 23-hour journey to Tulsa, Oklahoma.

"I've been driving all night, my hand's wet on the wheel..."

But his base model '57 Ford features an AM radio to keep him company on the drive through the night. Oh, and a couple of these on the passenger seat next to him: two white onions.

This is before the days of 5-hour energy drinks, so in order to power through the overnight drive to Tulsa, he needed a co-pilot with some kick to it.

That's right, whenever he felt the urge to nod off, he'd take a bite out of an onion. Life is a highway, and with the help a couple onions riding shotgun, he was gonna ride it all night long.

In my presentation workshops, I'll often ask for a show of hands: "Who here has driven across country, and did you do it in one fell swoop?"

• The occasional person has driven 48 hours straight (i.e., one duo regaled me with a tale of going from New Jersey to Seattle for a Phish concert).
• But most people break up the trip, maybe even stop in to see the World's Largest Ball of Twine on the way.

Why break up the trip? The answer is pretty simple: there are some cool things to see, and you need time to rest and recharge.

So let's pivot for a moment to talk about how you structure your PowerPoint slides.

Would you say that you usually design them like a Cannonball Run cross-country trip or... a driving trip with some designated landmarks picked out along the way?

Most of the slides I see look like this...they are organized horizontally. With bulleted statements taking up nearly the entire width of the slide. (aka "LA to DC" with no stops)

Let's look at this same slide and overlay a cross-country driving trip graphic.

But what if we organized the info vertically into 2 or 3 buckets of information, as if the slide has "time zones" or is a 3-part driving trip?

This is the equivalent of "driving across country, but layering in some rest stops for sightseeing."

Why this is important:

Don't build a slide that takes your audience on a Cannonball Run jaunt across the country. Let them enjoy the ride and the landmarks along the way.

After all, our goal is to get our audience to their destination awake, and without a terrible taste in their mouth.