7 ms·

When I make Apple style presentations (no visual noise, no bullet point lists, one appealing visual / idea on one slide etc and narrating the story instead of s

When I make Apple style presentations (no visual noise, no bullet point lists, one appealing visual / idea on one slide etc and narrating the story instead of showing densely packed info in one slide after another), I can literally see how my audience is really enjoying the presentation, getting the idea, but then constantly management approaches me telling me to use the corporate template, stick to the template, use the template elements, etc. They just don’t get it. What comprises a good presentation. Even if they themselves enjoy the content while they are in the audience. Futile. Edit: Tangential: I am the only one using a MacBook in a company of 700+ coworkers.

seventhtiger 1y ago
In my experience, people also use slides as a document rather than an aide. In all my presentations I prefer to use slides as a companion to my planned speech. Then afterwards I'm completely surprised when people ask for my slides. I send them gladly but they're completely useless on their own. So I have also experienced my managed pushing me to put all the information on the slide so that you can just read the slides and understand all the ideas, and the presenter is reduced to a voice over.
- _9ptr 1y ago
  I call it two kinds of slides: presentation slides and reading slides. The latter type probably should be a different type of document, but they are wildly popular. And since you're often expected to hand over the slides afterwards, I try to find a middle ground. The slide will have more than 5 words, but hopefully not too many. Pictures/graphs help with this.
  - petejodo 1y ago
    Reminded me of this which is a MIT lecture called “how to speak” https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY?si=8avRVtQ9blfD43Pf https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY?si=8avRVtQ9blfD43Pf
  - guidopallemans 1y ago
    One thing I like to do is interleave these two kinds of slides one by one. Put your visual on one slide, and longer-text bullet points on the next. Then while presenting the visual you have the bullets of the next slide in your presenter's view, and you can just skip that slide during the presentation. Then, when people ask for the slides they will indeed get all they want.
- Daniel_Van_Zant 1y ago
  I fight to record any presentations I do as often as possible. When I am asked for the slides I send the full recording instead as the way to manage this exact issue.
  - lucumo 1y ago
    What do you expect people to do with that? Spend another hour rewatching the thing? Push it into some AI summary tool?
    - Icathian 1y ago
      If information is important enough to bother someone asking for a copy of it, but not important enough to spend an hour ingesting, I'm not sure what to tell you.
      - lucumo 1y ago
        Wait. I'm unclear what your point is. Is it that asking for a copy is an unreasonable burden that should require a significant time investment from me? I've sent many copies of many things I made in my live. It's not so bad. And it's easily shared with many people at once. Or is it that people can't ingest any meaningful information in less than an hour? That's clearly not true either. A five minute article can contain extremely valuable insights. A 30 second conversation even more so.
        freeone3000 1y ago
        My company records all presentations: it’s like sharing the slides, but better, since we just have the entire presentation again.
        lucumo 1y ago
        Always recording is a good practice I think. It's so cheap with video conferencing that you might as well. Even if nobody uses it later, it didn't cost much. And if you get that one presentation that provides stellar value it's a gift that keeps on giving. I don't really agree that a recording is always better than the slides. Slides are a text medium, and as such can be searched. You can also go through them much, much faster than through a recording (even if you can listen at 2x). If you're just looking for something specific, slides can be much better. And sometimes you need to get the whole experience. And then the recording is much better.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  I use slides, but heavy on the notes. The notes in each slide, go into detail. I also like to use transitions and animations (not too obnoxious, though). Many of the slides in the shows referenced below, need to be played, as they may have a number of "steps." Makes it worthwhile to ask for my slides, and helps me to stay on track. I generally don't read the notes verbatim, but stay on the topics they describe. Examples: [0], [1], [2], [3], [4] [0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY/ITCB-master/tree/master/Presentations https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY/ITCB-master/tree/master/P... (A couple of Keynote presentations that are part of a teaching module on Core Bluetooth) [1] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_VjLsW5IrYSOv3fWj9R5QEhWg https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_V... (Google Slides -Discusses effective communication) [2] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11ZvUjZogJ86-AIsAv1Q38w1yFttCPg833AYtJ0bMfcg https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11ZvUjZogJ86-AIsAv1Q3... (Google Slides -A basic -and dated- intro to the Swift Programming Language) [3] https://littlegreenviper.com/cruft/CommunicationBasics.pptx https://littlegreenviper.com/cruft/CommunicationBasics.pptx (Downloads a PowerPoint for [1]) [4] https://littlegreenviper.com/a-quick-introduction-to-the-swift-programming-language/ https://littlegreenviper.com/a-quick-introduction-to-the-swi... (Blog entry for [2])
- jampekka 1y ago
  What's appropriate amount of information in the slides depends on the nature of the presentation. For short focused presentations (<10 min) minimal slides are the best if the verbal presentation is strong. For longer and more complicated ones more detailed slides are better for the audience. Audience will get distracted or misdirected at times, and making a clear and well flowing enough speech for more detailed and longer presentations is extremely hard.
  - seventhtiger 1y ago
    I started thinking of those presentations as a joint reading sessions.
  - no_wizard 1y ago
    I think of the (imo legendary) presentation Jobs gave when introducing the iPhone. A brand new product with features and usage patterns that most people never saw before in a mobile device. It had very little of those highly detailed bullet point slides, but you didn’t feel like after watching that presentation you didn’t “get it”. That’s the barometer I think about when it comes to presentations
    - CamperBob2 1y ago
      OK, fine, when I'm introducing a new cell phone model to the public, I'll do it Jobs's way. But that's not optimal for an in-depth technical presentation with actual content behind it. It will annoy the present audience and frustrate future readers. The idea that one presentation style fits every audience, every product, every scenario is just weird. Nothing else on the planet works that way, so why should slide decks?
      - matusp 1y ago
        Completely agree. Ironically, by focusing on Jobs' presentations, people are admiring the type of presentation that they will probably never do, and they do not consider that it probably cost 100s of man-hours to prepare it. I think it is more important to develop more practical skills to communicate effectively whatever you need, while not spending too much time on the deck preparation.
- bombcar 1y ago
  Two slide decks combined into one. Each presented slide should have a hidden slide immediately following that is the corporate style info dump. Then you get the best of both worlds. When you present it - It’s a nice deck of slides that keep people interested and help them to listen to the presentation. But when they download the deck, they see the slides that have all the details.
  - xeonmc 1y ago
    So kind of like a postcard where one side are pretty pictures and the other is the content?
- MattSayar 1y ago
  Simon Willison's annotated presentations are the GOAT: slides followed by the transcript of your talk for each slide https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations...
  - kingkongjaffa 1y ago
    As much as Simon’s blog is generally good to stay up to date on LLM’s this is not a good way to do a presentation at all. We shouldn’t conflate expertise from one field with ability in another.
    - simonw 1y ago
      I think you may have misunderstood what an "annotated presentation" is. It's not a new way of giving presentations. It's a way of publishing your presentations after you have given them where you turn the slides into a longer form written piece. So it can't be "not a good way to do a presentation at all", because I give presentations exactly the same as everyone else does! Slides with images and a few words. What's different is that I take the time to write them up properly afterwards. Here's my most recent example - in this case it wasn't a whole presentation, just the slide portion from a three hour workshop: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/15/building-on-llms/#llm-tutorial-intro.001.jpeg https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/15/building-on-llms/#llm-... Bunch more examples here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotated-talks/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotated-talks/
  - dan-robertson 1y ago
    Yeah, I think this sort of thing is a much better format than a slide deck, even if there’s a load of speaker notes you could read.
  - skeeter2020 1y ago
    I wish Maciej gave more talks, they are always very well prepared and entertaining: https://idlewords.com/talks/ https://idlewords.com/talks/
- bartread 1y ago
  I got around this by keeping the slides simple but dumping all the supplementary information, including most/all of the presentation content, into the notes section of each slide. That way if I sent people the deck they'd still have all the content. It's a while since I put anything on Slideshare, and I think it now does include notes, but it used to annoy me that back in the day it didn't.
- chrisweekly 1y ago
  Best advice on this I've encountered: use speaker notes, and optionally distribute them as a printed handout or separate digital artifact.
- Breza 1y ago
  I've experienced the same thing. I work with ad agencies, and it's common for my client to then turn around and present the same information to their clients, so they'll ask me to put every last word on the slide. It hurts my soul.
illwrks 1y ago
You need two versions, the detailed one to share afterward and a stripped back one that you talk to.
- sebastiennight 1y ago
  I like to do this, and have done so for our pitch deck as well, where I've got the "presentation" deck which I can run through in 1-5 minutes, vs the "shareable" deck with way too much info per slide. Having a separate presentation deck also allows for stories and visuals (eg personal photos) that I never include in the shared deck.
- alistairSH 1y ago
  I use the “notes” section for more detailed content. Doesn’t help if I have to share physical copies of the deck, but works fine if I pass along the whole file.
  - pas 1y ago
    the what copies? where? no, when? are you regularly giving talks in the 90s? are you the one messing with the timeline!!?
ssivark 1y ago
I've struck a tentative balance with the main one line messages being the slide titles, with other slide content buttressing the main point. I can tell the audience to ignore the content and focus on the title for certain slides; or just repeat the slide title before and after for emphasis, etc... while also having access to all kinds of supporting evidence (as is often necessary for technical talks). PS: Beware that stripped-down / minimalist presentations are suitable for the specific kind of communication / impressionism that Apple marketing is known for. But that's almost exactly the opposite of what is necessary in other situations. So that style is far from universally applicable; mustn't elevate form over function.
TacticalCoder 1y ago
> They just don’t get it. What comprises a good presentation. I take it one could argue between what's a presentation and a talk but to me one of the very best presentation I've seen is Rich Hickey presenting Clojure. Then there's "Simple made easy" considered by many to be one of the greatest ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4 There are many bullet points: but he'll go through each them and only show the next bullet point once he's done with the previous one. He even kids about a made up graph on one of the slide. I think that what makes a good presentation depends a lot on what's being presented.
NikolaNovak 1y ago
There are several different types of slides, and understanding it's purpose is the key success and agreement. At the very least I coach my team to think are these presentation slides (fee bullets, some visuals, focus on the speaker), vs are they or will they become reference slides, which will be read by people not at your presentation or some time later. And there's my all time (/s) favourite, project management by slides. I found it (eventually....) futile to rage against corporate culture of misuse of slides for purposes other than presentation. That's likely where your disconnect lies though. Hope you have better luck than I did long term!
arkh 1y ago
I always direct people to Beamer's (latex extension to make presentation decks) doc for their guide on presentation. https://texlive.mycozy.space/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc/beameruserguide.pdf https://texlive.mycozy.space/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc... (Getting Started > Guidelines for Creating Presentations) Some excerpts: * Ideally, a table of contents should be understandable by itself. In particular, it should be comprehensible before someone has heard your talk. * A frame with too little on it is better than a frame with too much on it. A usual frame should have between 20 and 40 words. The maximum should be at about 80 words * Do not assume that everyone in the audience is an expert on the subject matter. Even if the people listening to you should be experts, they may last have heard about things you consider obvious several years ago. You should always have the time for a quick reminder of what exactly a “semantical complexity class” or an “ω-complete partial ordering” is. * Keep it simple. Typically, your audience will see a slide for less than 50 seconds. They will not have the time to puzzle through long sentences or complicated formulas * Do not use more than two levels of “subitemizing.” beamer supports three levels, but you should not use that third level. Mostly, you should not even use the second one. Use good graphics instead. * Never use footnotes. They needlessly disrupt the flow of reading. Either what is said in the footnote is important and should be put in the normal text; or it is not important and should be omitted (especially in a presentation). * Use short sentences. * Put (at least) one graphic on each slide, whenever possible. Visualizations help an audience enormously * Like text, you should explain everything that is shown on a graphic. Unexplained details make the audience puzzle whether this was something important that they have missed. Be careful when importing graphics from a paper or some other source. They usually have much more detail than you will be able to explain and should be radically simplified * Do not use animations just to attract the attention of your audience. This often distracts attention away from the main topic of the slide. No matter how cute a rotating, flying theorem seems to look and no matter how badly you feel your audience needs some action to keep it happy, most people in the audience will typically feel you are making fun of them
- johannes1234321 1y ago
  > * Ideally, a table of contents should be understandable by itself. In particular, it should be comprehensible before someone has heard your talk. The typical agenda slide often is more than useless in my opinion. There are cases where it is good - if you have a recording and discuss individual topics and thus can jump around (but then have time marks as well and jump options in the player), but 99% of agendas are useless and speakers waste a lot of time on them (1. Introduce the speaker 2. Introduce the problem 3. Show old solutions 4. Show the new solution 5. Summary)
bartread 1y ago
> constantly management approaches me telling me to use the corporate template, stick to the template, use the template elements, etc. It sounds like the best policy is to carry on ignoring them.
esafak 1y ago
> Tangential: I am the only one using a MacBook in a company of 700+ coworkers It's not tangential. It speaks about what kind of a company it is.
JoshTriplett 1y ago
As others have noted, this comes from people expecting the slides to work as a document without the presenter. This is a bad idea (other document formats are better for that). But you can satisfy that desire in one of two ways: 1) Add lots of speaker notes, containing all the detail you presented, so that the combination of the presentation and speaker notes gives the self-contained information. 2) Write a separate self-contained document that contains all the information of the presentation, with slides containing a few words becoming section headings, and slides containing a useful image or chart becoming figures with captions. That'll be more useful than a corporate-style presentation deck would have been, but contain all the necessary information. Add a note to the top saying "This document contains all the information previously given in an X minute presentation. NAME is available to re-present this material on request."
brightball 1y ago
I have been doing white text on black slides for close to 15 years now. Totally agree with you when I have to use the template.
conradfr 1y ago
Well yeah, you have to put the new cover sheet on your TPS report.
skeeter2020 1y ago
...and it gets worse: this type of presentation is easily 10x more work to prepare, practice & deliver, and totally under-appreciated by the promoters of reading a wall of text. I went to business school, so basically have a Bachelor's of Power Point, and my tolerance for shity slide decks is close to zero.
theamk 1y ago
there is a great difference between corporate presentations vs sales presentation People on WWDC are there because they wanted to. Most corporate presentations are not like that. Yes, I am sure HR is very excited about that new expense reimbursement process. And the UX team is super happy about website redesign. And the team members sitting on the front rows are really enjoying hearing about their work. But most people who watch those don't really care. They only go to presentations because the other channels are insufficient - the team could not be figured out how to create concise docs that still have all the important details, so now everyone has suffer through another long presentation instead... In this case, you don't want "one visual per slide", you want to have informative slides so someone who is watching your presentation while eating lunch, or on 2x speed, does not get lost. Ideally, slides would be self-standing and presenter would only be needed for those who don't want to read. Listen to your management. They get it, you don't.
ewhanley 1y ago
Slides have unfortunately moved well beyond their intended use. People (management) often asks for more and more information density, but that's not the point of slides. What they really want is a report or memo. Slides were meant to convey information during presentation and don't hold up well absent that context. I hate slides as a medium outside of the specific text of a conversation - they're a bad pre-read, and they're a poor meeting summary. It's unfortunate that slides have become _the_ corporate communication medium.
victor871129 1y ago
The best presentation ever was at the time consoles pricing was around 350 and there was no console like the Playstation One and the Sony representative said: 299 and walks away, it does not matter the powerpoint software used, why a product is revolutionary is what matters. I don't care who was the Sony presenter.

seventhtiger 1y ago

In my experience, people also use slides as a document rather than an aide. In all my presentations I prefer to use slides as a companion to my planned speech. Then afterwards I'm completely surprised when people ask for my slides. I send them gladly but they're completely useless on their own. So I have also experienced my managed pushing me to put all the information on the slide so that you can just read the slides and understand all the ideas, and the presenter is reduced to a voice over.

_9ptr 1y ago
I call it two kinds of slides: presentation slides and reading slides. The latter type probably should be a different type of document, but they are wildly popular. And since you're often expected to hand over the slides afterwards, I try to find a middle ground. The slide will have more than 5 words, but hopefully not too many. Pictures/graphs help with this.
- petejodo 1y ago
  Reminded me of this which is a MIT lecture called “how to speak” https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY?si=8avRVtQ9blfD43Pf https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY?si=8avRVtQ9blfD43Pf
- guidopallemans 1y ago
  One thing I like to do is interleave these two kinds of slides one by one. Put your visual on one slide, and longer-text bullet points on the next. Then while presenting the visual you have the bullets of the next slide in your presenter's view, and you can just skip that slide during the presentation. Then, when people ask for the slides they will indeed get all they want.
Daniel_Van_Zant 1y ago
I fight to record any presentations I do as often as possible. When I am asked for the slides I send the full recording instead as the way to manage this exact issue.
- lucumo 1y ago
  What do you expect people to do with that? Spend another hour rewatching the thing? Push it into some AI summary tool?
  - Icathian 1y ago
    If information is important enough to bother someone asking for a copy of it, but not important enough to spend an hour ingesting, I'm not sure what to tell you.
    - lucumo 1y ago
      Wait. I'm unclear what your point is. Is it that asking for a copy is an unreasonable burden that should require a significant time investment from me? I've sent many copies of many things I made in my live. It's not so bad. And it's easily shared with many people at once. Or is it that people can't ingest any meaningful information in less than an hour? That's clearly not true either. A five minute article can contain extremely valuable insights. A 30 second conversation even more so.
      - freeone3000 1y ago
        My company records all presentations: it’s like sharing the slides, but better, since we just have the entire presentation again.
        lucumo 1y ago
        Always recording is a good practice I think. It's so cheap with video conferencing that you might as well. Even if nobody uses it later, it didn't cost much. And if you get that one presentation that provides stellar value it's a gift that keeps on giving. I don't really agree that a recording is always better than the slides. Slides are a text medium, and as such can be searched. You can also go through them much, much faster than through a recording (even if you can listen at 2x). If you're just looking for something specific, slides can be much better. And sometimes you need to get the whole experience. And then the recording is much better.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I use slides, but heavy on the notes. The notes in each slide, go into detail. I also like to use transitions and animations (not too obnoxious, though). Many of the slides in the shows referenced below, need to be played, as they may have a number of "steps." Makes it worthwhile to ask for my slides, and helps me to stay on track. I generally don't read the notes verbatim, but stay on the topics they describe. Examples: [0], [1], [2], [3], [4] [0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY/ITCB-master/tree/master/Presentations https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY/ITCB-master/tree/master/P... (A couple of Keynote presentations that are part of a teaching module on Core Bluetooth) [1] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_VjLsW5IrYSOv3fWj9R5QEhWg https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_V... (Google Slides -Discusses effective communication) [2] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11ZvUjZogJ86-AIsAv1Q38w1yFttCPg833AYtJ0bMfcg https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11ZvUjZogJ86-AIsAv1Q3... (Google Slides -A basic -and dated- intro to the Swift Programming Language) [3] https://littlegreenviper.com/cruft/CommunicationBasics.pptx https://littlegreenviper.com/cruft/CommunicationBasics.pptx (Downloads a PowerPoint for [1]) [4] https://littlegreenviper.com/a-quick-introduction-to-the-swift-programming-language/ https://littlegreenviper.com/a-quick-introduction-to-the-swi... (Blog entry for [2])
jampekka 1y ago
What's appropriate amount of information in the slides depends on the nature of the presentation. For short focused presentations (<10 min) minimal slides are the best if the verbal presentation is strong. For longer and more complicated ones more detailed slides are better for the audience. Audience will get distracted or misdirected at times, and making a clear and well flowing enough speech for more detailed and longer presentations is extremely hard.
- seventhtiger 1y ago
  I started thinking of those presentations as a joint reading sessions.
- no_wizard 1y ago
  I think of the (imo legendary) presentation Jobs gave when introducing the iPhone. A brand new product with features and usage patterns that most people never saw before in a mobile device. It had very little of those highly detailed bullet point slides, but you didn’t feel like after watching that presentation you didn’t “get it”. That’s the barometer I think about when it comes to presentations
  - CamperBob2 1y ago
    OK, fine, when I'm introducing a new cell phone model to the public, I'll do it Jobs's way. But that's not optimal for an in-depth technical presentation with actual content behind it. It will annoy the present audience and frustrate future readers. The idea that one presentation style fits every audience, every product, every scenario is just weird. Nothing else on the planet works that way, so why should slide decks?
    - matusp 1y ago
      Completely agree. Ironically, by focusing on Jobs' presentations, people are admiring the type of presentation that they will probably never do, and they do not consider that it probably cost 100s of man-hours to prepare it. I think it is more important to develop more practical skills to communicate effectively whatever you need, while not spending too much time on the deck preparation.
bombcar 1y ago
Two slide decks combined into one. Each presented slide should have a hidden slide immediately following that is the corporate style info dump. Then you get the best of both worlds. When you present it - It’s a nice deck of slides that keep people interested and help them to listen to the presentation. But when they download the deck, they see the slides that have all the details.
- xeonmc 1y ago
  So kind of like a postcard where one side are pretty pictures and the other is the content?
MattSayar 1y ago
Simon Willison's annotated presentations are the GOAT: slides followed by the transcript of your talk for each slide https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations...
- kingkongjaffa 1y ago
  As much as Simon’s blog is generally good to stay up to date on LLM’s this is not a good way to do a presentation at all. We shouldn’t conflate expertise from one field with ability in another.
  - simonw 1y ago
    I think you may have misunderstood what an "annotated presentation" is. It's not a new way of giving presentations. It's a way of publishing your presentations after you have given them where you turn the slides into a longer form written piece. So it can't be "not a good way to do a presentation at all", because I give presentations exactly the same as everyone else does! Slides with images and a few words. What's different is that I take the time to write them up properly afterwards. Here's my most recent example - in this case it wasn't a whole presentation, just the slide portion from a three hour workshop: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/15/building-on-llms/#llm-tutorial-intro.001.jpeg https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/15/building-on-llms/#llm-... Bunch more examples here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotated-talks/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotated-talks/
- dan-robertson 1y ago
  Yeah, I think this sort of thing is a much better format than a slide deck, even if there’s a load of speaker notes you could read.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  I wish Maciej gave more talks, they are always very well prepared and entertaining: https://idlewords.com/talks/ https://idlewords.com/talks/
bartread 1y ago
I got around this by keeping the slides simple but dumping all the supplementary information, including most/all of the presentation content, into the notes section of each slide. That way if I sent people the deck they'd still have all the content. It's a while since I put anything on Slideshare, and I think it now does include notes, but it used to annoy me that back in the day it didn't.
chrisweekly 1y ago
Best advice on this I've encountered: use speaker notes, and optionally distribute them as a printed handout or separate digital artifact.
Breza 1y ago
I've experienced the same thing. I work with ad agencies, and it's common for my client to then turn around and present the same information to their clients, so they'll ask me to put every last word on the slide. It hurts my soul.

illwrks 1y ago

You need two versions, the detailed one to share afterward and a stripped back one that you talk to.

sebastiennight 1y ago
I like to do this, and have done so for our pitch deck as well, where I've got the "presentation" deck which I can run through in 1-5 minutes, vs the "shareable" deck with way too much info per slide. Having a separate presentation deck also allows for stories and visuals (eg personal photos) that I never include in the shared deck.
alistairSH 1y ago
I use the “notes” section for more detailed content. Doesn’t help if I have to share physical copies of the deck, but works fine if I pass along the whole file.
- pas 1y ago
  the what copies? where? no, when? are you regularly giving talks in the 90s? are you the one messing with the timeline!!?

ssivark 1y ago

I've struck a tentative balance with the main one line messages being the slide titles, with other slide content buttressing the main point. I can tell the audience to ignore the content and focus on the title for certain slides; or just repeat the slide title before and after for emphasis, etc... while also having access to all kinds of supporting evidence (as is often necessary for technical talks). PS: Beware that stripped-down / minimalist presentations are suitable for the specific kind of communication / impressionism that Apple marketing is known for. But that's almost exactly the opposite of what is necessary in other situations. So that style is far from universally applicable; mustn't elevate form over function.

TacticalCoder 1y ago

> They just don’t get it. What comprises a good presentation. I take it one could argue between what's a presentation and a talk but to me one of the very best presentation I've seen is Rich Hickey presenting Clojure. Then there's "Simple made easy" considered by many to be one of the greatest ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4 There are many bullet points: but he'll go through each them and only show the next bullet point once he's done with the previous one. He even kids about a made up graph on one of the slide. I think that what makes a good presentation depends a lot on what's being presented.

NikolaNovak 1y ago

There are several different types of slides, and understanding it's purpose is the key success and agreement. At the very least I coach my team to think are these presentation slides (fee bullets, some visuals, focus on the speaker), vs are they or will they become reference slides, which will be read by people not at your presentation or some time later. And there's my all time (/s) favourite, project management by slides. I found it (eventually....) futile to rage against corporate culture of misuse of slides for purposes other than presentation. That's likely where your disconnect lies though. Hope you have better luck than I did long term!

arkh 1y ago

I always direct people to Beamer's (latex extension to make presentation decks) doc for their guide on presentation. https://texlive.mycozy.space/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc/beameruserguide.pdf https://texlive.mycozy.space/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc... (Getting Started > Guidelines for Creating Presentations) Some excerpts: * Ideally, a table of contents should be understandable by itself. In particular, it should be comprehensible before someone has heard your talk. * A frame with too little on it is better than a frame with too much on it. A usual frame should have between 20 and 40 words. The maximum should be at about 80 words * Do not assume that everyone in the audience is an expert on the subject matter. Even if the people listening to you should be experts, they may last have heard about things you consider obvious several years ago. You should always have the time for a quick reminder of what exactly a “semantical complexity class” or an “ω-complete partial ordering” is. * Keep it simple. Typically, your audience will see a slide for less than 50 seconds. They will not have the time to puzzle through long sentences or complicated formulas * Do not use more than two levels of “subitemizing.” beamer supports three levels, but you should not use that third level. Mostly, you should not even use the second one. Use good graphics instead. * Never use footnotes. They needlessly disrupt the flow of reading. Either what is said in the footnote is important and should be put in the normal text; or it is not important and should be omitted (especially in a presentation). * Use short sentences. * Put (at least) one graphic on each slide, whenever possible. Visualizations help an audience enormously * Like text, you should explain everything that is shown on a graphic. Unexplained details make the audience puzzle whether this was something important that they have missed. Be careful when importing graphics from a paper or some other source. They usually have much more detail than you will be able to explain and should be radically simplified * Do not use animations just to attract the attention of your audience. This often distracts attention away from the main topic of the slide. No matter how cute a rotating, flying theorem seems to look and no matter how badly you feel your audience needs some action to keep it happy, most people in the audience will typically feel you are making fun of them

johannes1234321 1y ago
> * Ideally, a table of contents should be understandable by itself. In particular, it should be comprehensible before someone has heard your talk. The typical agenda slide often is more than useless in my opinion. There are cases where it is good - if you have a recording and discuss individual topics and thus can jump around (but then have time marks as well and jump options in the player), but 99% of agendas are useless and speakers waste a lot of time on them (1. Introduce the speaker 2. Introduce the problem 3. Show old solutions 4. Show the new solution 5. Summary)

bartread 1y ago

> constantly management approaches me telling me to use the corporate template, stick to the template, use the template elements, etc. It sounds like the best policy is to carry on ignoring them.

esafak 1y ago

> Tangential: I am the only one using a MacBook in a company of 700+ coworkers It's not tangential. It speaks about what kind of a company it is.

JoshTriplett 1y ago

As others have noted, this comes from people expecting the slides to work as a document without the presenter. This is a bad idea (other document formats are better for that). But you can satisfy that desire in one of two ways: 1) Add lots of speaker notes, containing all the detail you presented, so that the combination of the presentation and speaker notes gives the self-contained information. 2) Write a separate self-contained document that contains all the information of the presentation, with slides containing a few words becoming section headings, and slides containing a useful image or chart becoming figures with captions. That'll be more useful than a corporate-style presentation deck would have been, but contain all the necessary information. Add a note to the top saying "This document contains all the information previously given in an X minute presentation. NAME is available to re-present this material on request."

brightball 1y ago

I have been doing white text on black slides for close to 15 years now. Totally agree with you when I have to use the template.

conradfr 1y ago

Well yeah, you have to put the new cover sheet on your TPS report.

skeeter2020 1y ago

...and it gets worse: this type of presentation is easily 10x more work to prepare, practice & deliver, and totally under-appreciated by the promoters of reading a wall of text. I went to business school, so basically have a Bachelor's of Power Point, and my tolerance for shity slide decks is close to zero.

theamk 1y ago

there is a great difference between corporate presentations vs sales presentation People on WWDC are there because they wanted to. Most corporate presentations are not like that. Yes, I am sure HR is very excited about that new expense reimbursement process. And the UX team is super happy about website redesign. And the team members sitting on the front rows are really enjoying hearing about their work. But most people who watch those don't really care. They only go to presentations because the other channels are insufficient - the team could not be figured out how to create concise docs that still have all the important details, so now everyone has suffer through another long presentation instead... In this case, you don't want "one visual per slide", you want to have informative slides so someone who is watching your presentation while eating lunch, or on 2x speed, does not get lost. Ideally, slides would be self-standing and presenter would only be needed for those who don't want to read. Listen to your management. They get it, you don't.

ewhanley 1y ago

Slides have unfortunately moved well beyond their intended use. People (management) often asks for more and more information density, but that's not the point of slides. What they really want is a report or memo. Slides were meant to convey information during presentation and don't hold up well absent that context. I hate slides as a medium outside of the specific text of a conversation - they're a bad pre-read, and they're a poor meeting summary. It's unfortunate that slides have become _the_ corporate communication medium.

victor871129 1y ago

The best presentation ever was at the time consoles pricing was around 350 and there was no console like the Playstation One and the Sony representative said: 299 and walks away, it does not matter the powerpoint software used, why a product is revolutionary is what matters. I don't care who was the Sony presenter.