Visual examples of slide formatting
Before and after examples of slide layouts, zooming, and structure.
Visual comparisons demonstrating how to break down complex slides, remove clutter, and maximize visual impact.
One bullet, one slide
Instead of keeping a single slide with a title and six bullets, break it down into an introductory slide, a summary slide, and individual slides.
Text version of the interactive demonstration. The weaker and the better version of the slide are shown side by side.
- Crowded & Overwhelming (the weaker version): A single slide titled “Collaborative thinking to further the overall value proposition” with 6 bullet points:
- Leverage agile frameworks to provide a robust synopsis for high level overviews.
- Iterative approaches to corporate strategy foster collaborative thinking.
- Organically grow the holistic world view of disruptive innovation.
- Bring to the table win-win survival strategies to ensure domination.
- At the end of the day, going forward, a new normal that has evolved.
- User generated content in real-time will have multiple touchpoints.
- Structured Sequence (the better version): Three slides: an introduction slide with the title “Collaborative thinking”, a summary slide with six icons and short placeholder bars, and a detail slide, “Point 1” followed by “Leverage agile frameworks to provide a robust synopsis.” Broken down into Intro, Summary, and Detail slides
Remove extraneous text from images
Clean up complex diagrams by removing the title and descriptive paragraphs, allowing you to zoom in on the graphic itself.
Text version of the interactive demonstration. The weaker and the better version of the slide are shown side by side.
- Small Graphic & Small Text (the weaker version): A slide titled “Nanotechnology immersion along the highway” with a small two-box graphic (Point 1, Point 2) and the small paragraph: “Override the digital divide with additional clickthroughs from DevOps. Nanotechnology immersion along the information highway will close the loop on focusing solely on the bottom line.” The audience strains to read the small text
- Zoomed In & Clear (the better version): A slide filled by an enlarged graphic of two circles, labelled Point 1 and Point 2, each with a subpoint, and no other text. The graphic fills the screen and speaks for itself
Zooming in on images
Full-screen images are better than images next to text. You almost never lose any important information by cropping.
Text version of the interactive demonstration. The weaker and the better version of the slide are shown side by side.
- Split Attention (the weaker version): A slide titled “Maximising minimums” with 4 bullet points on the left and a photograph on the right:
- Proactively envisioned multimedia
- Expertise and cross-media growth
- Quality intellectual capital
- Superior collaboration
- Immersive & Focused (the better version): A slide whose photograph fills the whole slide, with a title panel reading “Maximising minimums” and the reference “(Carls, Chunk, Hendersson 2016)”. Image sets the context instantly