How to make slides the TED way
Tips for crafting your best presentation.
During my time with TED I’ve made a lot of slides. Slides for my own talks. Slides for my colleagues’ talks. Slides for internal audiences, TED conferences, and even some TED speakers. And the countless talks I’ve seen over the years have revealed some patterns and practices that you can use — even if you think you’re not good at making slides. There’s no magic. The secret isn’t in how elegant your slides are, it’s in how you think about the role of slides in the context of your presentation. That’s it.
To understand what makes effective slides, we first need to zoom out a bit and consider just what it is you’re doing as a presenter. Head of TED Chris Anderson puts it this way…
“Your number one mission as a speaker is to take something that matters deeply to you and to rebuild it inside the minds of your listeners. We’ll call that something an “idea,” a mental construct that they can hold onto, walk away with, value, and in some sense be changed by.”
Your number one mission is taking something important to you and essentially reproducing it inside someone else’s head. Everything else is secondary.
Now it’s interesting to note that humans have been doing this “idea rebuilding” for tens of thousands of years through storytelling without any slides at all. Visual aids, as we know them, are a very recent innovation. Digital slides today are just one technique to help construct your ideas in the minds of your audience as you give your presentation.
But what do I mean exactly by “slides” and “presentations”? Aren’t those basically the same thing? Let’s pause here for some quick definitions.
Slide decks
Sometimes material is intended to be a standalone artifact that will circulate through an audience without you being there to talk through it, like sales reports that get distributed to marketing staff. These are meant to to be self-serve. Slide decks are…
- Standalone
- Distributed for asynchronous consumption (email, Google docs, you get the idea)
- Verbose, high information density
Presentations
Presentations are a real-time delivery of your ideas. They are…
- Given to a live audience (usually in-person but could be remote)
- May include slides that the presenter controls
With that distinction in our minds, let’s look move on to what makes effective slides.
Planning your slides
Before creating a single slide, there are four things to think through.
1. Fully develop your talk first
When it comes to making slides, procrastinating is good. Here’s why.
Imagine someone sits down to make the slides they want to show, and then develops their talk around them. The result will be (often literally) a slideshow without an effective throughline — what we call the connective, narrative tissue holding a talk together, over time, around a central idea. Instead, write out your talk (in outline or scripted form) and run through it. If there are moments you know will require a slide, just imagine you have them (for now).
There’s a test I like to put to most presentations: If the laptop died and all the slides were lost, can the presentation still be given so that its core idea is sufficiently reconstructed in the audience’s mind? If yes, the test is passed and you’ve got the foundation over which to layer slides.
2. Identify where and why slides would clearly enhance your presentation
When you have your presentation’s spoken content in front of you, start thinking of it as the first of two tracks. This first track is the core of your presentation, the words coming out of your mouth. You could even think of it as the audio track to your presentation. The other track is an empty track for your slides (or the “video” track).
Now, note the moments in the spoken audio track (your outline/script) where slides are either necessary or will clearly help your audience understand that moment clearly. These moments will be the blueprint for what will become your slide track. Doing this will help you stay intentional about the visuals you’ll need to create and keep the throughline of your presentation intact.
3. Determine, in advance, what will attract the most attention
When it comes to how the brain responds to stimuli, seeing a slide is like hearing “don’t think of a big grey elephant.” Just as the brain can’t avoid thinking of a big grey elephant, it also can’t avoid allocating resources to processing your slides. As an effective presenter, you’re in complete control of what your audience hears and sees. That also means you’re responsible for the cognitive load they will be handling — and slides always add some amount of load. Give your audience the gift of planning in advance for them how much work their brains will have to do at any moment.
4. Lead your audience
Walk your audience into a slide, don’t let the slide walk you. You have a secret power in that you’re the only one who knows what’s coming next. Don’t make it look like you and your audience are both discovering what the next slide is at the same time. Use your power! Verbally ease the audience into your slides as if they were natural scenery in your story. “…We wanted to find out why this problem was happening, so we designed some tests and gathered some data. An interesting pattern emerged [Click to slide] that I think you’ll find interesting…” Doing this makes you look comfortable and knowledgable without coming across as over-rehearsed.
Thinking about slides in these four ways will inform how you craft them, where they appear in your story, and what relationship they will have with your presentation as a whole.
But what about the actual slides themselves? What does a “good” slide look like? The answer to that involves some subjectivity, but there are a few practical tips consider.
Tactical tips for creating slides
1. Use the slide to do what you can’t do as a speaker
A good general question to routinely think about is “How can this slide drive home what I’m talking about in this moment of my presentation?” Lots of things meet this standard. Images. Graphs. Video and audio.
Except text. Text is easy to overuse. Text on slides lead to cognitive load, diverting an audience away from your spoken words for as long as it takes takes to read. However, they can work really well when terse, punchy, pointed, and placed at important moments in your presentation.
2. Give each slide a single, focused purpose
Craft slides so their essence — whatever that might be — can be absorbed and meaningfully processed in just a few seconds. If it takes longer, try to break it up into smaller components distributed over multiple slides or builds. Think of your slide like a gift. You want it to enhance your audience’s experience, not burden them with information to process.
3. Use photos to stir emotion and meaning
Photos can provide a straightforward visual to describe what you’re speaking about. But they’re also a perfect device for getting your audience to feel something, or to connect with a concept. When you associate an emotion to a point in your story, that point will become stickier in the minds of your listeners.
Try to avoid cliches, though. If you’re talking about a tough challenge you had to overcome, resist using a businessperson in a suit jumping over a hurdle with a briefcase, or a silhouette of a mountain climber. How about a massive pile of dirty dishes? Use your imagination. Find something memorable that other people can relate to, or better yet, see themselves in.
4. Resist using effects and transitions
Motion is very powerful in its ability to attract the brain’s attention. Motion is effective in user interfaces. But for presentations, they’re unnecessary at best. The rule I like to follow is this: If an animation isn’t fundamental to the idea being communicated in the slide, it’s probably better to avoid it altogether. In general, try to limit your effects to the basics, like dissolves and fades, which can be quite nice and reduce the jarring effect when suddenly changing slides.
5. Reduce charts, graphs and data to the important parts
Data in visualized and raw form can be dense with information, but it’s the underlying stories they tell that make them interesting and salient for your audience. Why not do the work for your audience in advance, and highlight only what’s necessary for the story to come out? If the slide is showing complex information (say, the relationship between inflation, interest rates, and trade deficits), direct viewers to what’s relevant for the moment using highlights, annotations or contrast. If you really want to impress, consider creating a custom chart with just the data you want to show instead of a screen shot from your reporting software. It may even be more effective to let go of units and precision altogether and just present your audience with the takeaways in an abstract way.
A parting thought…
Slides are often assumed to add value to a talk, but would it surprise you that the most viewed TED Talk of all time (and 3 of the top 5) have no digital slides at all? Bryan Stevenson gave a talk in 2012 that ended with the longest standing-ovation ever at TED. He didn’t have any slides. Many of the top TED Talks are given through the spoken word alone.
As you think about what you are giving to your audience, keep in mind that your central message, your idea, is the center of gravity of your presentation. If called upon, slides should always be in service of that.
Resources
Courses
If you really want to take things to a high level, TED offers a great app for learning all you need to up your level of presentation literacy called TED Masterclass. This course will guide you through 11 lessons as you develop your idea into a masterful talk.
Books
If there was a holy text for presentations, public speaking, and how to think about visuals, it’d be the Official TED guide to public speaking by Head of TED Chris Anderson. The HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations is is also packed with practical presentation mojo, and has a lovely chapter on slides.
Photos
Unsplash is the go to for quality images that are free for you to use, but there are other great sources too, like Pexels.
Tools
Prezi is a leading product for generating custom presentations with a full feature set. Just exercise restraint! Because it has bedazzling features does not mean you should use them. Keynote is TED’s go-to app, both internally and for many speakers.
