Breaking up is great to do.

April 8th, 2009 | Jeff Brenman

Overloading a slide with too much information is an all too common presentation design faux pas.

Bullet point after bullet point — one for each idea you want to express — clutters the slide and forces your audience to spend more time reading than listening.

People often try to reduce the clutter with animations, building one bullet point on the screen at a time, but by the last build it’s still a bloated mess.

Instead, break up your content and put each point on its own slide. It’ll give your messages some room to breathe, making it less likely for you to overload your audience with too much information. Your story will be easier to follow.

Splitting up your content helps you the designer see which points can be enhanced with an evocative visual. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand bullets — so why not use one?

Great slides help you tell your story. Bad slides distract your audience, or worse, force them to work harder to understand you. Avoid bloated slides. Break them up.

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Posted in: Design | 6 Comments

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6 Responses to “Breaking up is great to do.”

1. Rowan Manahan says:

   April 9, 2009 at 9:44 am

   Really nice post Jeff – I just blogged it.
2. Bryan Buckley says:

   April 9, 2009 at 10:04 am

   I read this post this morning and gave it a shot with my class. My slides weren’t quite as slick as yours, but not half bad. And I think the students liked them.

   Thanks for the tip.
3. Joey Asher says:

   April 10, 2009 at 4:54 pm

   This is a great point. It also gets people away from composing their presentaitons on PowerPoint, which is never a good idea.
4. bk says:

   April 14, 2009 at 1:27 pm

   Love the concept…but simplicity can have it’s drawbacks too. Take a look at slide 3 – just looking at that can make someone think airtight containers are bad…its incredibly important to make sure your point is absolutely clear when providing one idea / slide.
5. Bruce Gabrielle says:

   July 12, 2009 at 3:54 pm

   Nice post on the importance of not cluttering your slides too much. But I find that it’s often better to keep bullet points on the same slide when the ideas are related. For instance, it’s better to show the top 4 barriers to technology adoption on one slide. When you spread them over 4 slides, it loses cohesion. The reader has to remember all 4 barriers and put it back together again.

   My rule is to limit to 4 bullet points per slide and separate each bullet point with whitespace. Note, this is NOT for presenting to an audience, but for documents that will be sent via email and read alone, such as a market reseach report.

   Also, the title of the slide makes the 4 bullet points hang together easily. In your example, I’d change the headline to “The four secrets of the perfect cup of java” then use a numbered list instead of bullets. That works fine for the reader.
6. Ruth says:

   May 16, 2010 at 10:38 pm

   Jeff – Generally, this is good advice and I, too, advocate this approach.

   I agree with BK – that the visual seems to say that airtight containers are not a good idea.

   I disagree with Bruce. You are obviously approaching this from a presentations perspective where a speaker is using the slides as they were intended – as a visual complement to their words and presence.

   Sending slides as a printed document to be read is another use for slides (as much as it pains me to admit it).