CRA Inc

Presentation Design Tips

Since PowerPoint 1.0 launched in September 1987 it’s grown to become a staple in our daily business life. It seems a meeting isn’t complete without a projector and a screen. At CRA we don’t always believe there’s a need for PowerPoint (sometimes uninterrupted dialogue is more powerful), but we do believe if created correctly, PowerPoint can be extremely helpful in illustrating your thoughts.

I’m sure many of you have witnessed a time when a presentation caused confusion and actually spoiled the main message. I thought about this as I read The Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler. The book touches on principles of design that apply to everything from everyday computer programs to the not-so-everyday nuclear power plant, Three Mile Island. Below I’ve listed the book’s top design tips for a successful PowerPoint presentation.

1) Color. The color you use should serve a purpose: “to attract attention, group elements, indicate meaning, and enhance aesthetics,” the book explains. Use color in moderation, and limit your color choices to five (which is the number of colors the eye can process in one glance). For simple, successful color selection, stick with the primary colors.

2) Framing. Think about the order of your presentation. To make sure you tell your story in the best order possible. Think about how the audience will see and hear your story. Graphics, text, and background information can powerfully alter how people view your presentation.

3) Ockham’s Razor. Ockham, a medieval friar and scholastic scholar, is credited with the idea that when given a choice between functionally equivalent designs, the simplest design will be chosen. This means simple designs are favored over complex designs. While this seems like common knowledge, I believe it’s the number one cause of “death by PowerPoint.” We want our presentations to be flashy and attention-grabbing, but in reality the clutter makes the presentation less effective. When in doubt, stick to basics.

4) Picture Superiority Effect. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Pictures are “generally more easily recognized and recalled than words, although memory for pictures and words together is superior to memory for words alone or pictures alone.” Audience memory increases even further when words and pictures are used together. With this in mind, you can emphasize key points incorporating pictures and words together to gain the highest level of audience recall.

5) Readability. I think the book explains this best, “It is a common belief that complex information requires complex presentation. This is not true. The most complex information requires the simplest presentation so that the focus is on the information rather than the way it is presented.” Avoid acronyms and jargon.

Avid CommLog readers know this isn’t the first time we’ve written about PowerPoint. To refresh your memory click here and here and view some of our other posts about PowerPoint. With these tips in mind, hopefully, we can all avoid “death by PowerPoint” and be more successful communicators in the long run.

The Change Management Challenge of Urban Violence

Is urban violence viral? It might be, according to experts cited in this New York Times magazine article. The essence:

CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa. He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. “For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,” Slutkin told me recently. “And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.” Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior).

It seems plausible, and interestingly, very similar to our approach to stakeholder management at the office–except in that case, we’re trying to foster the spread of behavior rather than hinder it.

Either way, the central issue is network effects, and in particular, the role of hyper-connected actors within the network. Think of it this way: If someone catches the cold, but only interacts with a few other people, the rate of transmission is likely to be low. If on the other hand the ill person shakes 100 hands a day, well, a lot of people are probably going to get sick. Substitute the willingness to enact violence, or support for your company’s SAP implementation, for the common cold, and it’s clear that not everyone in the network is equal in the effects they exert on the whole. It’s all about dealing with the critical few.

For the seminal academic piece read Rogers; for the seminal popular piece read Gladwell (the book or the original article).