Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations (Voices That Matter)

by Garr Reynolds

Several years ago, management expert Tom Peters began emphasizing the importance of design. In his book Re-Imagine! (DK Adult, 2006), Peters states that we’re all designers and that we all need to become more design mindful. “Presentation of a financial report is as much a ‘design thing’ as is the creation of a sexy-looking product.” Design isn’t just about iPods and cool products; it’s about improving people’s lives and making things clear and accessible. Design, at its most fundamental level, is about finding solutions.

Presentations and design If your ideas matter—if your business plans, your research results, or your cause are worth spreading—then design and presentation matter. “The more people who know your idea the more powerful it becomes,” says business guru Seth Godin. Solid oral presentation amplified through the effective use of multimedia and good design is a powerful way to spread your message. If you can present well, you will be doing your cause—and those who share your cause—a great service. Presentations are not everything, but they are one thing that can make a big difference in getting your message out. When you’re trying to change the world, there is no excuse for being boring and there is no excuse for poorly designed visuals.

Embrace constraints. Constraints and limitations are wonderful allies. They lead to enhanced creativity and ingenious solutions that, without constrains, might never have been discovered. In the words of T.S. Eliot, “Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl.” Constraints can be inspiring and liberating

Learn to view limitations not as annoyances but as welcome editors that force you to think creatively.

Practice restraint. Anyone can add more. It takes discipline of mind and strength of will to make the hard choices about what to include and what to exclude. Self-editing is an important skill, but it’s something we all struggle with.

Hillman Curtis says, “You may include things you believe to be crucial in a design, but those elements are often only crucial to you.” The genius, however, is often in what you omit.

Know when to stop. Hara hachi bu, which means “Eat until 80 percent full,” is a Japanese idea from the culinary world. This idea can be applied to the length of meetings and presentations, and also to the amount of content and the number of elements you use to express your message. The answer to the question “How much should I include?” can only be answered by you, as you are closest to the problem. But remember that self-restraint—the kind exercised in hara hachi bu—is difficult but often leads to greater clarity. Resist the urge to pile on more “just in case.

Adopt the beginner’s mind. As the old saying goes, in the expert’s mind there are few possibilities, but for the beginner’s mind, the world is wide open. While you are an expert at what you do, try to take a step back and approach your problem the way a child does, without preconceived notions of what can and cannot be done. As an exercise in creativity, take a chance and look at a problem from a new perspective. Designers understand the need to take risks, especially during the early explorations of a problem. They are not afraid to break with convention. Good designers are open minded and comfortable with ambiguity early in the process; this is how discoveries are made.

Check your ego at the door. This is not about you; it’s about them. It’s about your audience, customer, patient, student, etc. Look at the problem from their point of view—put yourself in their shoes. This is not easy; it takes a great deal of empathy. Empathy, an undervalued “soft skill,” can be a great differentiator that sets you apart from others. It is key to truly understanding a problem, a problem that impacts others. One of the fundamental ideas about design and design thinking is that the work is not about us. It’s always about solving a problem in the best interest of others.

Focus on the experience of the design. It’s not the thing—it’s the experience of the thing. This is related to No. 4 earlier: Put yourself in the beginner’s shoes. How do people interact with your solution? It’s not about the features of your product or the technical superiority of your designs; it’s about what it means to the users. It’s about how real people interact with your design. Remember that much of design has an emotional component—sometimes this is even the largest component, although users may be unaware of this. Do not neglect the emotional aspect of your solutions.

Become a master storyteller. Often it’s not only the design—the solution to a problem—that is important, but the story of it. This is related to No. 5 earlier. Ditch your ego and focus on the meaning of the solution. Practice illustrating the significance of solutions, both verbally and visually. Learn to avoid slick, polished pitches, and instead take people on a short journey that explains the significance of your design. Start with the general, then zoom in on the detail. Expand the focus again to remind us of the theme or key concept, then zoom back in to illuminate more detail. The details are important and necessary, but what people remember is the story.

Think communication—not decoration. Design, even graphic design, is not about aesthetics, although aesthetics are important. As a general principle, create visuals and other designs that express what is necessary. Minimize or eliminate that which is excess. As Issac Newton said, “...more is in vain, when less will serve.” Every design has a central concept or message; anything that leads to confusion or distracts from your intended message is considered noise. Nonessential elements may not always be noise—this is for you to decide on a case-by-case basis. Just be sure to always keep in mind the need to eliminate clutter to make your message clear. Design is about making things clear with as much economy and simplicity as possible.

Obsess about ideas—not tools. Tools are important and necessary, but they come and go as better tools come along. Obsess, instead, about ideas. A simple pencil and sketch pad can be your most useful tools, especially in the early stages of thinking, because they are the most direct. Good advice to follow is to go analog in the beginning. The best ideas and the best designs almost always begin with a pencil and paper, a pen and a napkin, or a marker and a whiteboard. When brainstorming a solution to a problem, move away from the computer. The best presentations—including visuals for those presentations—usually start in your mind, not on your screen.

Clarify your intention. Design is about choices and intentions; it is not accidental. Design is about process. Design is often systematic, although there is room for great flexibility and creativity within a system. The end user will usually not notice “the design of it.” To the user, it may seem like “it just works,” assuming they think about it at all. This ease-of-use or ease-of-understanding is not by accident. It’s a result of your careful choices and decisions, including your deliberate choices about what to include and what to exclude.

Sharpen your vision and curiosity, and learn from the lessons around you. Good designers are skilled at noticing and observing. They are able to see both the big picture and the details of the world around them. Humans are natural pattern seekers, so be mindful of this aptitude in yourself and in others. Design is a “whole brain” process. You are creative, practical, rational, analytic, empathetic, and passionate. Foster these skills in yourself and in others.

Simplify as much as you can—but no more. It was Albert Einstein who said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Simplicity is our guiding principle. Simplicity means many things to many people. Scores of books have been written on the subject. For our purposes, simplicity means embracing most of the concepts discussed here to avoid the extraneous. It means making the conscious decision to cut unnecessary information and design elements. If you can do it with less, then do it with less. Yet simplicity is not only about subtraction. As MIT professor and designer John Maeda says, “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.” You will find tools for achieving simplicity in many of the principles covered in this book, including hierarchy, unity, balance, the use of color and typography, and much more. All of these principles can help us achieve clarity of message and simplicity of design.

Utilize empty space. Designers see empty space not as nothing but as a powerful something. The biggest mistake most people make is seeing empty space as something that must be filled in—as something that is wasted unless it is occupied with more elements. But it is the empty space, also called negative space or white space, that makes the positive elements of a design stand out. If you look at empty space as something to be avoided, then your designs are very likely to be cluttered. The intentional use of space does not just lead to better aesthetic qualities; it’s a powerful tool for directing the eye and establishing clear design priorities. Empty space, then, is absolutely crucial for obtaining clarity in your message.

the fundamental concepts related to communication are restraint, simplicity, and naturalness. Restraint in preparation, simplicity in design, and naturalness in delivery.

far from being easy, simplicity in design is actually hard to achieve. In other words, simplicity is not simple. We should not be concerned with what is easy for us, however, but what is easy for them. Thinking like a designer, our goal is to make visuals that support our message in a manner that is easiest for our audience to understand, revealing our message in the clearest way possible. Having a better understanding of key design principles will indeed make things a bit easier for us, and a lot easier for our audience.

Our goal is to create designs that are honest, true, and simple, but always simple in a way that helps the viewer understand in the clearest way possible.

Design, at its most fundamental level, is about finding solutions. It is in our interest as professionals to become more knowledgeable about design in general and graphic design and visual communication in particular.

In the case of presentation visuals, designs must be free of errors and they must be accurate. Visuals also touch our audience at an emotional level.

Simplicity in design sounds easy, but is actually hard to achieve. The goal is to make visuals that support our message in a manner that is easiest for our audience to understand, revealing our message in the clearest way possible. Having a better understanding of key design principles wi...

Form (rules or structure) is necessary for freedom to exist. If you have the form, you can exercise great freedom. If you have no form—if everything and anything goes—you often create an experience...

once you take a closer look and begin to study the art of typography, you discover that type has both an aesthetic quality and a function: It can be as beautiful as it is useful. When you put a word into type, you have given it a visual form while the verbal meaning remains. This dual nature of typography is what makes it so fascinating and so potentially powerful.

proper choice and usage of type can go a long way toward making your visual message heard.

Designing for the Last Row

The question for us is always can they see—and read quickly with ease—the type on our slides. Clear, effective type is especially important when you consider presenting visuals in a large room where people are sitting at various distances from the screen, sometimes quite far away. Always design for the people in the last row.

If you cannot make out the text when viewing slides in the slide sorter view, then your text is probably too small for everyone in your audience to read.

simplicity is the key to using type effectively in your presentations, and a fundamental tenet of simplicity is excluding the nonessential. Extra or decorative elements often result in visuals that feel cluttered, and the meaning of the text may be weakened as a result. You can look at four different things to eliminate clutter and simplify: Look at the design of the typeface itself. Are the lines clean and the letterforms easy to read at the current size? Do other elements in the slide make the type harder to read? Is there simply too much text for one slide? Can you eliminate some text and retain meaning? Type displayed in too many colors can also add a feeling of clutter and visual noise.

When considering the type to use for presentation visuals onscreen, focus on how legible the type is when displayed on the screen and how easy it is to read shorter sections of text. Generally, a sans serif typeface is best for projected slides, but at large sizes, even a serif typeface such as Garamond is legible.

Reliable typefaces

Consider choosing a typeface for your presentation that contains several different weights within the same type family. This gives you flexibility while at the same time making it easier to keep harmony among the fonts you choose. These different weights and styles are more than you’d ever use in one presentation. Choose two or three that have good contrast and work well together. Because they are all from the same family, you can get away with using quite a variety of weights—if you have a reason. Using typefaces from the same font family for a project is one way to shoot for harmony, but remember to use different weights and sizes to establish hierarchy, for emphasis, and to create visual interest. Using type from the same family does not at all mean the design will be dull.

Creating Harmony When you design with type, the goal is to create harmonious relationships. For a subdued look, you might use typefaces of similar weight and style within the same family and not vary the sizes much. For a more dynamic but still harmonious look, you can combine typefaces that are clearly different and vary the weight and style. The size and location of the type impacts the relationship as well. Try mixing type from the same font family or by mixing type from two families such as a classic serif and a clean, bold sans serif.

How many typefaces to use A common concern is how many different typefaces to use in one design (or in our case, in one deck of slides). A good rule of thumb is one or two (or sometimes three). The different sizes and weights create hierarchy naturally, so anything more than two different typefaces is usually not necessary. You can use more than two, but just be clear that you have a good reason for doing so.

This type of problem can even occur using type from the same family but slight variations in size. For example, if one line is 48 points and another line is 45 points, the slight difference in size looks accidental. Are they supposed to be different? If so, what does the difference mean? You can prevent confusion by making sure that the type for various levels of meaning (heads, subheads, and body text) are markedly different in size, weight, style, family, and so forth.

Text placement on slides When you insert a new text box in slideware, the type you enter is horizontal. This is obviously a good default choice, but you may consider placing text at angles or in an unconventional location (depending on the subject and audience). Unusual placement from time to time adds a dynamic dimension. Most people never think to use a rotated effect for text, yet it is an effective technique when done with discretion. Type placed at an angle will get attention if all the other elements—including other type—have perfectly horizontal and vertical lines. Professional graphic designers often use rotated type because it pops out: it may imply motion, informality, nonconformity, power, change, and so on. Type can be rotated at a subtle angle that allows for the type to fit more harmoniously with the content of the image.

Images can improve recognition and recall, and images combined with text can make for an even stronger message—as long as the text and images reinforce the same message. Photographs are powerful on their own and can be used to form their own narrative, but when we combine text with photos, we alter the meaning just a bit. The placement, style, and meaning of the text within the picture all have a part in guiding the viewer’s interpretation of the image. This goes both ways, of course. An image can also change the meaning of text. Notice in the simple examples that follow how the meaning changes. The photograph alone may have several different meanings depending on your interpretation; once we add text, the message changes.

Placing text on images Placing text over a dynamic image with little empty space always poses legibility problems. One way to deal with this is to use boxes of solid or transparent color between the image and the text to separate the text from the image and bring it forward. There are many methods for doing this, so be sure to use a similar technique throughout the presentation for a unified look. The following slide sample contains a colorful, high-contrast photo of a street in Tokyo. It would be difficult for text to pop out from this busy scene without a little help. These are just a few examples of text placed on images.

Presentation flow The single most important thing in sequencing a presentation is that everything must flow logically from beginning to end, and require no prior knowledge on the part of the audience. You do not want the audience to have to “think” at all, which means you need to answer every potential question at exactly the right place, just before the audience would think to ask it. It sounds easy, but 99% of presentations don’t do it.

The opening The world’s greatest presentation trainers, such as Granville Toogood (The Articulate Executive) and Jerry Weissman (Presenting to Win), all agree that the presenter has between 30 and 60 seconds to grab the attention of the audience. To do this, start with nothing on the screen but your company logo, your name, and your title. Then, begin with something dramatic and memorable that will have the audience want to follow along with you for the rest of the presentation. This opening can be a personal anecdote, an unusual number, a historic progression, a counterintuitive fact, whatever is appropriate. Virtually anything that will start the presentation with a bang and set the mood for the remainder of the pitch is desirable.

Context setting It is crucial that after the opening, the presenter immediately set out the context for the rest of the presentation. This should not be the agenda for the presentation, but rather should be (at least for a venture fundraising pitch) an ex...

Sequence The slide/topic sequence for a fundraising pitch is pretty straightforward, and should only be deviated from after careful consideration. It should look like this: Company Logo [during the opening] Business Overview [the context setter] Management Team Market/Pain Points Product [including photos or screen shots] Business Model Customers [current and projected] Strategic Relationships, If Any Competition Barriers to Entry Financial Overview Capital, Valuation, and Use of Proceeds Review (Logo/Image)

Less is more (and even less is even more). None of the greatest speakers throughout history ever used PowerPoint. By definition any time the audience is looking at the screen, they are not looking at you.

The leave-behind Never, ever hand out copies of your slides, and certainly not before your presentation. That is the kiss of death. By definition, since slides are “speaker support” material, they are there in support of the speaker—that is, you. Therefore, slides should be completely incapable of standing by themselves, and are useless to give to your audience where they will simply be guaranteed to be a distraction during your talk. The flip side of this is that if the slides can stand by themselves, why the heck are you up there in front of them? Just hand out the slides and sit down! Instead, prepare a leave-behind deck that is different from (and substantially more complete than) the presentation you actually give (but that follows the same general structure). This should be left behind after you finish.

Builds People are only capable of absorbing a very small amount of material at a time. Therefore, it is counterproductive to throw up a slide with lots of text or complicated diagrams. Each change on the screen should relate to one simple new thought that should be expanded and explained by the presenter. As such, I am a great fan of “builds,” in which text or a diagram is additively built in front of the audience over several minutes. Since each advance is effectively a new slide, it is possible to slowly and simply build up to a comprehensive dénouement without losing your audience along the way. I have done builds with 15 or more components, which when delivered properly, can take upward of 15 minutes to run through but never result in flagging audience attention.

Delivery Here’s a key concept that is completely counterintuitive, but unbelievably power...

and only then bring up the new slide. This puts you in command of the presentation, and not the other way around, and trains the audience to expect that all new and important information is coming from you rather than from a slide deck.

Color is one of the most powerful visual stimuli there is. It gets our attention and affects us at an emotional level whether we are aware of it or not. Color can be used to get attention, to direct the eye, to categorize, to organize, to create unity, and to evoke emotions or to set a mood. In the world of presentations, colors are experienced as direct light illuminating from a screen or monitor (as opposed to colors on the printed page, which are seen as reflected light). We see colors with our eyes, but we perceive colors in our minds. Often we are not conscious of the perception, but its impact can be profound. The human eye can distinguish millions of colors and modern technology can produce nearly as many. While it is possible for us to design slides with a virtually unlimited color palette using today’s software tools, it is important to remember that restraint and simplicity are our guiding principles.

Express the Essence with Less The objective of sumi-e is not to re-create a subject to look perfectly like the original. The objective is to capture and express the subject’s essence. This is achieved not with more but with less.