Great slides can enhance your arguments, provide a compelling counter-point to your talk, and help create dynamic tension.
Awful slides can take away all of the focus from what you’re saying, bore your audience into a stupor, or provide reading light while the audience checks their emails.
Make it readable
That means big, big fonts, excellent contrast, and using the top half of the screen in preference to the bottom half, since part of the audience might be sitting behind other parts of the audience.
Avoid bullets
No, really. If you need notes, put them on paper cards, or in the presenter view in your presenter software. The audience will read ahead of you, and then will go straight to their email.
Instead, reduce the text on the slide to just the theme of what you are speaking about. If you can get away with it, just use one word. Or even better, an image.
Use code carefully
Code is tricky. It requires context.
A few things to note:
- Use as big a font as you can get away with
- Go with dark text on light background
- Use syntax highlighting
- Simplify your sample until only the absolute minimum is left
If you take screenshots, make sure you can make the image large enough without getting fuzzy. If you don’t take screenshots, you’re going to want to look into something that creates syntax highlighted .rtf versions of your code.
The python library pygments is a good choice. You’ll need a decent color schema. That one is based off of github’s syntax highlighting, and was used to create these sample slides.
If you’re emulating terminal output/commands a black background will work, but make sure that the font color is extremely bright.
Resources
- Better Presentation Slides (video) A lightning talk by Shane Becker (@veganstraightedge)
- Slide Design For Developers A blog post by Zach Holman (@holman)
- Improve Your Technical Slides Excellent tips about colors, fonts, and using code.
- 5 Things Every Presenter Needs To Know About People 5 minute video by Dr. Weinschenk, including tips on how to use slides.
- Add your advice! Make a pull request
Further Reading
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