Many column inches have been devoted to making your presentation accessible to a wide audience, using contrast and fonts with care, presentation skills and ways to keep an audience engaged. Ignore them.
With a bit of practice, you can make your PowerPoint presentation completely inaccessible to everybody. Follow these hot tips to alienate your entire audience and leave them at best bewildered as to your intent and purpose.
- Text should be too small to read. Also, be loquacious - verging on the rambling. Deploy excessive jargon. Use acronyms without explaining them. Ideally you should reproduce text-heavy, complex graphics from documents you haven’t circulated by taking screen shots and then making them too small to be legible. Do not use bullet points if block text will do.
- Your logo (in the corner of?every?slide) should occupy enough space to make any full screen images unworkable – so you’ll have to reduce them to two thirds of the size. See if you can shift the logo slightly in every successive slide to trigger anyone with even baseline visual acuity. Again, too-small text and complex organisational charts are essential components.
- Crop graphs and colour-coded tables so as to remove title, key, labels and axes. Remove photo attribution if it was supplied. Best practice is to copy and paste pictures from Google. If your image is low-res, this is the perfect time to use it at full screen and make folks squint. Not even varifocals will help them!
- Resize images - especially head shots of important people, flags, and the logos of partner organisations. If they don’t already look like a reflection in a carnival mirror, you can change that simply by unchecking the box next to the height and width measurements. Again, use low resolution pictures and enlarge them to be blurry. Aspire to convince at least one attendee to quietly book a check-up at Specsavers.
- The presentation is your draft script. Read everything out, but not exactly as written. You can embellish each point with context so long as it doesn't add much clarity, but make sure you read?every point?in detail. Their time is your time. You are in charge. If you overrun, you can simply thank people for their time and exit the room. Avoid eye contact, questions, sincerity and smiling.
- An alternative approach is to script something for someone else to read out that?in no way?relates to the order of the slides you provide, and with no indications of when to move to the next visual atrocity. If you can, engage a person with enough authority to command silence but no natural public speaking skills.
For extra credit, ignore reflexive pronoun conventions and deploy them liberally to make yourself sound “more professional”.
I have waited many years to post this, after the original incident that provoked it. I realise it may come across as passive-aggressive because you can’t hear the smile in my voice, but it’s intended to be comic-with-a-purpose. Really well-designed presentations can make complex matters easy to convey and discuss. Hasty work can scupper engagement and make relatively simple things appear pointlessly boring.
I advocate taking the time to make presentations as good as you can, then getting feedback from a friendly non-specialist. I am convinced that taking this time to get things right will subsequently repay much more than the cost of those few hours.
If you have a communications and/or marketing manager/team in your organisation, they are going to be invaluable to your success. In my limited experience the traditional offerings to these gurus of style are chocolate, biscuits, and chocolate biscuits.
