Using a Red Box to help audience focus on slide content

Quite often, we have lots of things to display on our slides, and as a result, making it difficult for the audience to pinpoint what we are referring to on the slide during the presentation.

A good practice would be to keep slides content to a minimum. However, this might not always be possible because we might not have time to analyze the raw data completely to remove irrelevant content.

When presenting, it is crucial always to lead our audience to focus on the key message in our presentation slide. This is easy if we only have one message per slide. In reality, most will have more than one message per slide, making this a challenging task.

When presenting on projected slides in a meeting room or a conference hall, most speakers would use a laser pointer to circle the area of the slide content, trying to guide the audience to look at the content that the speaker is referring to.

This is a distraction, and the speaker will always have his back facing the audience. Not an ideal situation as you are losing eye contact with the audience.

One simple solution that works for me is using a red box (actually, it can be any color and doesn’t have to be red). Draw a red box over the message (text, image, object, information) that you would like your audience to focus on while presenting the message. As you present, move the red box to the next message in the sequence of your presentation.

Doing this will also help you keep eye contact with your audience. Instead of using a laser pointer to point at the message, the red box helps identify the message for your audience.

Again, not ideal to have so much information on a single slide, but if it’s unavoidable, use the red box. Move the red box to the next area when explaining the next content.

Do not use the red box as an excuse for not simplifying complex content. When possible, always try to reduce the amount of information shown on a single slide.

The red box should be used selectively as a last resort to maintain focus on presentation content.

So the next time you are designing presentation slides, add a red box where appropriate to help your audience focus on your content. In this way, you can also maintain eye contact with your audience.

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