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Slide rules
As Andy has already mentioned, we all spent yesterday at the Future of Web Apps summit in London, and one thing stood out more than anything else for me: the astonishingly poor quality of the presentation slides. It seems that people giving presentations are so worried about what they’re going to say that they completely neglect the not-too-tricky art of making good quality slides.
Only one of the speakers got it spot on, and that was Cal Henderson of Flickr, whose slides consisted of colourful, relevant and oft-witty full screen images accompanied by a title set in huge, white, bold Helvetica positioned at the bottom left of the slide. During Cal’s presentation, people listened to him rather than read his slides. He’s an engaging talker, sure, he’s laid-back, confident and not afraid of stumbling or forgetting his lines, but it’s amazing how others who seemed as comfortable as Cal, exposed their public-speaking insecurities in their visuals.
First up was Joshua Schacter (of del.icio.us), who did a good job. Simple, white slides with large, bold black text in an unpretentious typeface. Not spectacular by any means, and hardly memorable, but they didn’t draw the audience’s attention or detract from his words.
I’ve already spoken about Cal Henderson’s slides. Given the content of his presentation and his lively personality, they were as near to perfect as possible.
Tom Coates’ talk was wonderful; clever, witty, genuinely useful and enlightened. His slides were sloppy, I stopped even looking at them after five minutes. At one point he put up a slide of a truly awful graph plotting the Web 2.0 ‘meme map’ done by Tim O’Reilly. Hideous, confusing and 99% illegible to anyone in the auditorium. I thought to begin with that this was the point, that some gentle mockery was to begin, but then Tom put up his own map(s) afterwards that were just as illegible. Tiny black text on a colourful background; they were informative, I’m sure, but illegible. The propensity of these graphics, combined with over-zealous bulletting and extended use of the ugly-when-used-for-anything-more-than-a-word FF Alega typeface. Great talk, sloppy slides.
I had high hopes for David Heinemeier Hansson’s talk. I’m a big fan of 37signals‘ work, their design style and their clever use of type, bold colours and whitespace, and in this, David didn’t dissappoint. Many of the slides were bold, colourful and simple; they emphasised rather than summarised what the speaker was talking about, and they punctuated the talk beautifully. My problem with David’s talk was the really quite extraordinary use of code-snippets on around about 15-20 slides. There’s a room full of 800 people, some more than 100 yards away from the projected screen, so why anyone thinks putting up whole pages of code snippits is a good idea, I don’t know. We can’t read them, they’re distracting, and if what you’re talking about relies on them, perhaps you rethink what you’re talking about.
Shaun Inman (of Mint) came third, highly anticipated given his nous for design. His slides weren’t a disappointment, but they were a little unispiring. The dark slides with minty green and grey DIN were to the point and succinct, but like Joshua Schacter’s lacked any real energy or life. Workmanlike, but not bad.
Andrew Shorten’s Adobe Flex presentaion was just a waste of time; and the more it went on, the more it sounded like an extended sales pitch for an unnecessary new technology. If tehre is anything exciting about Flex, then it wasn’t made exciting by Andrew’s presentation and slides. The slides would have been confusing had they been printed out A3 and pinned up on a notice board a few feet away. Terrible, confusing mixes of graphs, paragraphs of text, and on one page I counted 12 bullet points. Honestly, Adobe are supposed to be a creative, visually driven company — couldn’t they at least try and think about their audience?
On to the host’s presentation. Ryan Carson (creator/founder of DropSend) created some truly lovely looking slides. His use of a big, bold weight of Clarendon caused a stir in the IRC chat room, and the gentle spotlighting of each slide’s titles was both subtle and effective. Even his use of the fancy rotate transitions in Apple’s Keynote software wasn’t gratuitious (though it was very Jobs-esque). My only problem with Ryan’s slides was that he got a little bullet happy at time (like Shaun using a light-weight of DIN for the text), which disturbed the balance of the pages too much, and turned everyone off his voice and on to trying to read the slides. Aesthetically lovely, but ditch the bullets in future, Ryan, or add just one or two, in a larger type size.
You can tell that Google is full of Geeks without a design-bone between them, by the sheer awfulness of the slides used by Steffen Meschkat. They looked like a scientific paper projected onto a screen. White background, black, lightweight serifed type (I fear it was actually Times New Roman, but I couldn’t read a word so obviously couldn’t judge the letterforms properly) and rarely did he use up more than a third of the slide space (all at the top — vertical centering is obviously too styled). I’m all for ‘undesign’, but when the pared down approach is taken, you have to pare down to something readable and simple. Steffen was also guilty of posting huge code snippets in tiny text that were completely pointless. He could have used blank slides for the talk and no-one would have noticed the difference.
I’m all negative today aren’t I? To balance it, here are some positive tips for whenever you’re creating slides for your next presentation:
- No sentances or paragraphs of text; if you have to use more than 10 words on a single slide, question your motivation; are you trying to guide your audience, or yourself?
- Use imagery! Don’t be afraid to have a slide with just a single image on. Overlay a little text if you wish, but make it readable.
- Do you really need to put your name, the date and your company’s name on EVERY slide? Think about it.
- If you’re putting dark text on a pale background, you’d better use bold text, as light spreads, and can fill in the stroke joins. Similarly, if you’re using pale text on a dark background, you should make sure you choose a typeface for which a little blurring at the corners won’t affect readability.
- No bullet points. If your list requires bullet points for it to be discerned as a list, you have too many items in it. I repeat, NO BULLET POINTS.
- Graphs are great, but make them big, simple and clear. A pie chart with 15 labels will not be easily readable, no matter how you dress it up.
- Avoid code snippets like the plague. A conference is very rarely a good place to try and explain something that requires as much concentration and time-investment as trying to interpret code does.
All in all, I was surprised (and not in a good way) at the quality of the slides on offer at the summit. The most painful thing is that every presentation (Cal’s apart) could have been improved by making some adjustment to the slide decks used by the speakers, and not ones that it takes 25 years at powerpoint school to learn. Simple, user focused ideas, that you would have thought a bunch of people who spend their lives building software that thinks about it’s users would have considered.