3 ways to create better presentation slides

Are you in the habit of outlining your presentation within your slides?

If so, when you plan your slide deck’s content, you can easily fall into a trap.

I’m talking about the tendency of too many presenters to cram loads of content on each slide, and to continue to speak in front of a slide for which the content has already been covered. It’s as if your thinking was “Let’s leave no slide space uncovered. Let’s be sure that a content slide is viewed at all times, whether it’s relevant to what I’m saying right now or not.”

But that would be to assume this is a strategy. I find a lot of clients haven’t given any thought to spacing out their content so that the audience has a prayer of absorbing it. It’s the slide equivalent of talking really, really fast. Jam in the info! Keep going! No pauses to think!

That might benefit the nervous speaker who’s just trying to get through the presentation. Maybe. But it won’t benefit you if the audience can’t take away anything meaningful. Try these three ways to space out your slide content instead:

1. Declutter individual slides.