Now that you have an idea what types of aids you might do for your presentation,
let's talk about some design issues: how you can design appropriate aids.
We'll focus on guidelines in general, as well as those specific to
slides, transparencies, and we'll call "boards," and images.
The first general design guideline is that you should prepare your presentation
aids well in advance. Don't wait until the night before.
Having them prepared in advance gives you the time to make them look good,
as well as plenty of time to practice your presentation with the aids.
When you practice in front of others, ask for feedback on your age as well as your speech.
Having them prepared in advance also gives you the time to change them.
If you find out that they're not effective--
which helps with the second guideline:
Make sure your aids look or sound professional.
They should be simple, accurate, uncluttered, and error-free.
Have someone else look at them, particularly for proofreading.
Ask if there's too much information on each aid, if they're hard to read,
and what could make them appear more professional.
Consider a variety of issues, such as the purpose of the presentation and what aids will help you
achieve that purpose most effectively.
Another issue is the resources that you have to create the aids.
If you don't have access to color printer, for example,
that limits what you can use.
Your skills are a resource as well.
If you're not an artist or you don't know how to use PowerPoint,
that limits your resources.
What does the facility have available?
While most academic classrooms have overhead projectors,
most businesses do no. If the facility doesn't have computer projection and you
don't have your own,
that will limit how you approach your aids. Consider if text or graphics would
be the best way to get your point across.
Or perhaps a combination of both. And how many aids will you need?
Related to that is the question of if you need aids or not?
That answer varies according to the speech purpose and the approach you're taking.
In a speech class, the use and number of aids
may be dictated by the assignment, so check to make sure what your instructor requires.
But in real life, no one will say, "And you need to have 3 presentation aids for your speech."
You would use aids as the situation and the speech requires.
Finally, as technology increases, so does the need for a backup plan.
What would you do if your laptop or computer projector don't talk to each other?
You might want to prepare overhead transparencies as a backup.
If there's no outlet available to plug your CD player in?
Think about the worst-case scenario before you encounter it.
Now we'll focus on some guidelines specifically for
slides or transparencies, or what will loosely call, "boards."
One suggestion is to mix text and graphics where appropriate.
An entire presentation composed only of word charts would be boring.
Mix it up!If you're using graphs, include text to help us better understand what we're looking at.
If you're missing the title of the graph, we may miss the point of the aid,
and, then, of the speech.
All the text must be...
Oh, um... that word is "readable."
Readable in size, in font, and color. You can use color for contrast or highlight pretty easily
if you're using Power Point but you can also do that in boards.
Some of these examples are difficult to see due to poor contras. whilel
others are much easier to see. If you are designing your aids,
you need to consider color. If you're using titles in your presentation,
those titles should make a point so that the information underneath
supports what the title says. And just because you know how to do something,
doesn't mean that you should.
Reconsider all the bells and whistles because they can often distract your audience,
resulting in a negative perception rather than a positive.
Your presentation aids should feel unified, and one technique is to use a theme to
connect the aids.
In PowerPoint and Keynote, they're called "templates." They're designed to make us, as
the audience, feel as if every aid is part of the same presentation.
So if you use a computer program such as
PowerPoint or Keynote, you can use some themes.
If you're going to end up printing these to overhead transparencies, makes sure
that the template you choose has a white background.
Here's are some example themes that I found in Power Point
and you'll notice that they give different feelings,
and some of them are not appropriate at all
for a presentation on presentation aids.
So choose the right template for your presentation
Now we'll focus specifically on the text that you may have
on your visual aid.
First and foremost, think about what it looks like from the back of the room.
If you're looking at this, you're probably seeing something that is just all the
words--it's way too much information for you to be able to pay attention to.
This slide violates several of the criteria that I will identify for you.
First is limit the amount of content that is on the screen.
Try to limit it to only four to six lines of text.
Also, size matters--at least in this case.
You should use at least a 24-point font for the text on your screen.
Sometimes you might have to use a bigger font, depending upon how
the room is set up. Continuing on the subject of fonts,
fonts come in serif and sans serif styles.
Serif fonts have little feet on each of the letters that supposedly
help your eyes move from one letter to another, making it easier to read a word.
"Sans" means "without," so sans serif means a font without those little feet.
Interestingly, the research says that people with dyslexia
have an easier time reading sans serif fonts, which is why most my slides tend to use sans serif.
We also need to keep in in mind readability and portability.
If you are using a font that is very difficult to read,
then your audience is spending so much time processing what they're seeing that
they're not able to get the information you are communicating to them.
Portability becomes an issue if you are moving between computers.
The fonts that you have on one computer might not be the same as the ones on the
computer that you will use to either print overheads or to project your slides from.
For example, there are some cross-platform fonts that are likely to be installed on
any computer that you to use. However, there are also sometimes computer specific fonts,
these may be on some computers but not all.
the problem with this is that a font that you have on the computer that you design your slides on
may not be on the one that you are planning to project from.
So while you may type in one font, when actually shows up on the screen
it shows up in a different font, and Oftentimes it throws the whole design
of your slide off.
Now that we talked about how important fonts are,
let's focus next on what you should put on there. In terms of the words,
put phrases rather than complete sentences up there.
You will be expanding upon the points and there's no reason to show every word.
Make it brief. This will help you also meet the
4 to 6 lines of text per page.
Display your words in a combination
upper and lower cases, with all the text horizontal.
If you've ever gotten emails where someone has typed the message in all CAPS--
that's called "shouting"--
which is very difficult to read you think that the person is annoyed at you.
If you put your words vertically, that's also very hard for people to process==
rather use it horizontally.
Limit your lines to no more than 40 characters if all possible.
This line has 45 characters, not counting spaces.
Try to use the same space at the top of
each slide, so that when you change slides, particularly in computer projection,
the titles don't jump.
It can create a very unsettling image for the audience.
Now let's revise this slide
so that it meets most of the criteria that we previously talked about.
You'll notice how much easier it is to understand and process the information
So we've talked about general design principles and text,
let's focus now on utilizing images--pictures--
that you might want to include in your presentation,
again either on a slide, overhead transparency, or a board.
Ethics first: If you are doing this presentation
outside of an academic environment,
please check the copyright;it's so easy to go online and download an image
that we don't always think that those images might be copy written.
When you purchase a program such as Microsoft Word, you also purchase the
clip art images, or the media file
images that are included in that program, so you can use those
images without worrying about copyright.
You also should check for color or contrast on any images that you might import
into a slide or put on board.
For example, this image doesn't fit well with the background;
it's too close in background but not close enough.
If you add a background that is a different color,
it might set the image off, but it also might make the color change between
image in the background more jarring for the audience.
With presentation aids, size definitely does matter.
Look at this little picture in the bottom of
my daughter at her graduation with her aunt--
very small, hard to see, and oftentimes people use
small photographs in presentations and expect us to be able to see them.
Now it's easy to use a computer program to adjust the image and make it larger,
but you also need to be careful of pixelation.
For example, let's take this image and enlarge it.
It's very large difficult to see.
So we talked about text and we talked about images, now let's talk about
audio and audiovisuals. In this case, I'm talking about music or movie clips.
How can use these effectively in a presentation?
First, you need to select only the applicable portion only the part that you want the
audience to listen to.
That means that you will have to carefully edit it down.
I would recommend that you edit to 30 seconds or less.
If you're using a DVD, you will need to copy it onto a different medium
because DVD's are impossible to get started quickly and fast forward to the
scene you want.
Another point that you have to consider is what you were going to do while your audience views
or listens to your clip. Are you going to talk over the video clip to point out
what you want us to pay attention to?
Make sure the volume is down and we don't always have to hear what's going on
if you're showing something digital.
If we listen to a music clip, we'll probably be looking at you during that time.
In either case, what seems like a short 30 seconds when you're practicing
will feel like a long five minutes when you're actually presenting.
And remember Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong,
it will go wrong at the worst possible moment.
Prepare for the unexpected; we've mentioned this before,
but this bears repeating.
Quiz Time:
What should you consider when using text in your visual aid?
And identify at least one consideration that is unique to designing slide presentations like PowerPoint.
Now it's time for you to go design your own presentation aids,
keeping all these guidelines in mind.