23 topics
Slide design help, starting with what the title is for
A slide headed 'Results' with six bullets under it fails for a mechanical reason: your audience reads those bullets in about four seconds and you take ninety to say them, so for the next eighty-six seconds you are competing with your own slide and losing. The fix that solves most of it at once is to make the title a full sentence that states the point — 'Sales fell in every quarter but the last' — and let the body of the slide be the one piece of evidence for it.
Where students get stuck
My slides are wall-to-wall text and I'm told to cut it
Move the words to the speaker notes rather than deleting them, because the resistance to cutting is usually fear of forgetting. Then rebuild each slide as an assertion and its evidence: the title says the claim in a complete sentence, and the body carries one chart, one image or three short lines that support it. The words you were going to read are the ones you say out loud. A slide is not a document and not a teleprompter, and the moment it tries to be both it stops being either.
I don't know how much belongs on one slide
One idea per slide, and the word 'and' is the detector. If the honest title of your slide contains 'and', you have two slides. Splitting costs nothing — nobody has ever complained that a deck had too many slides if each one went past quickly — while cramming costs you the audience's attention every time, because they have to work out which part of a crowded slide you are currently talking about. Slide count is not the thing being marked; density is what makes a deck hard to follow.
My charts are unreadable from the back of the room
Design for the back row and everything else follows. Set a floor of about twenty-four point for any text on a chart, which will force you to strip things out, and stripping is the point. Delete gridlines, delete the border, delete the legend and label the lines directly where they end so nobody has to look back and forth. If one series carries your argument, colour that one and grey the rest. A chart on a slide has a different job from a chart in a report: it makes a single point at a glance, not a dataset available for study.
I end up reading my slides and sounding like a robot
That is a symptom of writing the slides first and the talk never. Write what you are going to say as spoken sentences before you open any slide software, then ask each slide what it adds that your voice cannot — a number, a photo, a diagram, a shape of data. Anything that only repeats your words should not be there. If you find you cannot deliver a section without reading it, the problem is that you do not yet know that section, and more text on the slide will make that more obvious rather than less.
My deck looks messy but I can't say why
It is usually inconsistency rather than ugliness. Titles that start at a different height on each slide, three fonts, five accent colours, images in four different sizes — each one is small and the accumulation reads as careless. Fix it by constraint: two fonts at most, one accent colour, every title in the same position, every image aligned to the same edge. Also check contrast, since a pale grey on white that looks refined on your laptop disappears entirely on a projector in a lit classroom.
What's covered
Slide Design topics you can work through with a tutor, generate practice on, or turn into flashcards and a study plan.
Slide structure
- Assertion–evidence titles
- One idea per slide
- Speaker notes versus on-slide text
- Agenda, section breaks and signposting
- Deck arc and slide count for a timed talk
Visual hierarchy
- Alignment and consistent placement
- White space and density
- Type size floors for a projected room
- Two-font limit and a single accent colour
- Contrast and projector-safe colour choices
Data on slides
- Choosing a chart type for the claim
- Direct labelling instead of legends
- Removing chart junk and gridlines
- Highlighting the one series that matters
- Tables: when to use one and when not to
Images and motion
- Image resolution and cropping
- Attribution and image licensing
- Diagrams and simple process visuals
- Builds and reveals used sparingly
- Accessibility: alt text and colour-blind-safe palettes
Presenting the deck
- Rehearsing to time with slide changes
- Handling a slide that fails to load
- Standing so you are not blocking the screen
Slide Design questions
Will it build the slides for me?
No — it does not generate slide files, and nothing here exports a deck. What it does is talk through the structure with you and critique what you describe or show it. If you share your screen with the deck open, it can look at a slide and tell you what is competing with what, which is the part that is hard to judge on your own.
Can it look at a slide I've already made?
Yes, through screen sharing or by holding a printout up to the camera. That is more useful than describing a slide in words, because the problems worth catching are spatial — where the eye goes first, what is too small, what is misaligned by six pixels in a way you have stopped noticing.
How many slides should a ten-minute presentation have?
There is no correct number, and any rule you have been told is a rough average of very different talks. The useful question is whether each slide earns its place and whether you can deliver the whole thing in time. A ten-minute talk with thirty fast slides can work; one with six dense slides usually does not.
Stuck on slide design right now?
Talk it through out loud, share your screen, and watch it worked out step by step on a whiteboard.
Start free — no card