The Simple Mindsets That Lead to Awesome Slides
You have slides. Now, how do you use them?
First, you have to understand something: The vast majority of slides are awful.
Straight.
Up.
Terrible.
No. They are worse than you are thinking. They are really, really bad.
If you have to choose between no slides and bad slides — go no slides every single time.
But slides can be awesome. They can help people understand your preaching, get excited about your upcoming events, etc.. You just have to know how to use them.
This isn’t about being a great graphic designer or being good at software. The software doesn’t matter. Most of the time we use google slides. Many of our slides are designed using Canva. They work just fine. This is about having the right mindset when it comes to slides. In other words, if you think about slides the right way, you’ll be 90% of the way there.
Here are five ways to think about slides that will help you:
1. Think like Five Guys: focus on content over presentation.
Here is the brutal truth about slides: they won’t make a bad sermon good, in fact, they might make it worse. Slides aren’t a silver bullet.
If your sermon (or whatever you are using slides for) isn’t good without slides, it’s not going to be good with slides.
Consider 5 Guys. They spend almost no time on their presentation. Everything in a 5 Guys looks like it came out of the food service truck. A five guys looks like every mom and pop pizza joint. It looks generic and boring.
But I would still gladly drop $30 of my money at a 5 Guys rather than $20 at my beautiful McDonalds. Why? Their CONTENT is better. 5 Guys doesn’t worry about making it pretty — because they are too busy worrying about making it good.
Slides are best when they are salt and pepper to an already amazing meal. So focus on being a great preacher or planning a great event and then let the slides enhance that.
As the great powerpoint guru Charles Spurgeon said:
The golden key to keeping people’s attention is saying something worth listening to.
2. Think like a museum curator: create an experience.
I love visiting a good museum. Going to a good museum is an immersive and emotional experience. A museum isn’t a bunch of text — that’s an encyclopedia. It’s not bunch of pictures or artifacts — that’s a warehouse. A museum takes those things and crafts an experience.
The best slides turns a speech into an experience.
- You can use slides to show powerful photos that incite emotion like humor, sadness, or awe.
- You can use slides to make people feel like they are part of a story.
- You can use slides to give people a sense of place.
- You can use slides to illustrate a point.
Don’t just put a bunch of words on the screen. That leads to the next point:
3. Think like Michael Moore: refuse to use bullets.
O.k.. I jest. I don’t really want you to think like Micheal Moore and I’m not against guns or bullets. But I am against powerpoint slides that rely heavily on bullet points or use excessive text.
You should avoid bullets in real life and you should avoid bullets on your slides. Here are a few simple tips to help you with that:
If it won’t fit on a tweet, it shouldn’t be on a powerpoint slide. Your slides should have no more than 40 words on them and should ideally have much less than that.
Never ever read your slides. When you put a bunch of text on a slide and then read it — people in the audience can read it faster. While you are reading a boring slide, they are thinking “get on with it already.” Consider a handout instead.
Forget the templates and start with a blank slide. In whatever slide software you use, don’t even mess with their themes and templates — just start with a blank slate and you’ll be less tempted to make boring bullet slides.
If you do use bullets, give each bullet point it’s own slide and ghost out the rest of the text. This enables people to know where you are AND draws obvious attention to one point.
4. Think like a caveman: use simple pictures.
In Dan Roam’s fantastic book “The Back of the Napkin” he teaches you how to use very simple pictures to communicate complicated ideas. The most valuable thing in the book is the truth that there really only a few basic kinds of pictures that you can use for illustration:
To show who or what — use a portrait.
To show when — use a timeline.
To show where — use a map.
To show how much — use a pie or bar chart.
To show how — use a flowchart.
These don’t have to be complicated. In fact — the simpler they are the better.
In a sermon, don’t just talk about the cat of nine tails — show a picture of it. Don’t just tell people Jacob travelled 500 miles from Hebron to Haran — show them a map that traces his path across what would be today several countries. If you are teaching on eschatology — use a simple timeline. You get the idea.
5. Think like a billboard company: keep it simple.
Your slide isn’t a document. It’s much closer to a billboard. Billboards are meant to be read as you are speeding down the highway at 70mph when you should be paying attention to other things. You only have a fleeting second to take them in. So billboard companies do several things really really well that would also help your slides immensely:
Say only one thing.
Billboards say only one thing. You never see a billboard with a paragraph of text or with multiple bullets. You’d never get that information. No, they are mostly visual and usually give only one message. On your slides, try to say only one thing per slide. It’s much better to have too many slides than too much stuff on one.
Use large clear typography.
You rarely see cursive type on a billboard and that’s for a reason (the same reason you don’t see cursive type on road signs.) Billboard companies have figured out that the easiest type to read is a sans-serif typeface (think Arial, not Times New Roman.) When you choose a font for your slides, legibility should trump fancy every single time.
Use plenty of contrast.
Billboard companies usually make sure that their text really stands out, because you only have a fleeting second to see it. Few things are worse than having to squint at a screen to see text — so make sure that your color choices allow for plenty of contrast between the text and background.
