Enhancing presentations with slides and other visuals. The following section discusses enhancing presentations with slides and other visuals. Though many communicators decry slide presentations as sleep-inducing, when done correctly, slides actually enhance and support your oral presentation. The key is remembering to choose visual representations over textual ones so that the words on the slide do not compete with yours.
If you must use text, limit the number of bullet phrases and the number of words within each phrase taking a less-is-more approach. Remember that slides aren’t the only way to enhance your oral presentation; handouts, brochures, photographs, videos, prototypes, and other tangible elements work well in many situations in place of or alongside a slideshow.
Let’s see how Orange Photography, full service agency providing photography for both well renowned corporations, as well as individuals, approaches these theories in practice.
My preferred type of visual for when I’m giving presentation tends to be photography—that's the business we’re in and it has the most impact [inaudible]. But I think it definitively applies to other types of presentations as well. In terms of making emotional connection with the audience, I think photography is very, really good for that kind of format. And as well as diagrams, you know, serve conceptual diagrams versus not, not keeping the text down to a minimum so that people are not always reading what you’re presenting and really try and listen to you. So I think the visual tends to be more emotional connection with the audience.
I think it’s important to have a really simple slide presentation because again, you really—while you give an oral presentation, you want the audience to be listening to you and not reading what’s on the slide and trying to—I mean, if it’s something really complex, to have, deconstruct what’s on the slide. It really, the slide is really just more of an outline of what you’re covering and that’s something that you want to keep really simple so that people shift their focus to your presentation.
Font selection in putting together collateral and marketing material is an important part of your presentation whether it’s a marketing brochure or a slideshow presentation because again, it definitely has a subtle impact to an audience on the nature of the presentation. If you have a lot of different types of fonts it could be very confusing and feel disjointed to the audience when you’re using a lot of different types of fonts. So font selection is a, it’s an art in itself and it does convey an emotional sort of impact depending on your font selection, so but, you know, the general recommendation is to keep it a little more consistent throughout—throughout all your marketing materials in terms of what the, what they brand means and what the font means—keeping that consistent and not, not changing the font selection every time you do a different type of brochure, things like that.
The advantages of presenting in PowerPoint are really that it’s the popular program to present slideshows and things like that, so there’s a lot of resources around getting you up to speed on PowerPoint as well as having templates available in PowerPoint and things like that. So that’s one thing that’s really, a couple of things that are really advantageous about presenting in PowerPoint.
The cons to PowerPoint is that you know, it’s not, on the Mac it’s not as a powerful of a platform, so you might have to explore other, other options on the Mac.
I think color in, you know, presentations and [inaudible] should do apply certain types of emotional connections, so it is you know, if you are going after more of an emotional connection with clients than obviously you could color like black, red, or things like that will have an impact as well as too much color or too subtle color, so it’s definitively, again, like font selection, color selection is a subtle but important part of presenting your material.