Comments on: Breaking up is great to do.

By: Ruth

Ruth — Mon, 17 May 2010 03:38:52 +0000

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).

By: Bruce Gabrielle

Bruce Gabrielle — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:54:55 +0000

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.

By: bk

bk — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:27:16 +0000

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.

By: Joey Asher

Joey Asher — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:54:33 +0000

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

By: Bryan Buckley

Bryan Buckley — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:04:35 +0000

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.

By: Rowan Manahan

Rowan Manahan — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:44:27 +0000

Really nice post Jeff – I just blogged it.