FREE REPORT: 3 Actions to Double Your Efficiency at Work

→ To get your FREE REPORT, click here

→ UNIQUE CHANGE MANAGEMENT WORKSHOP
in-company and truly tailor-made. Info here

Too much eye candy may overkill some people. Sobriety in your charts pays off.

I just spent a few hours this week-end reviewing a couple of flashy slides for a financial reporting to the press. It's about jetski sales in Europe and North America. The message was well conceived but each slide tried to be either high-tech, full of animations, or not too well illustrated.

What's in it for you here? Well, if you're not championing PowerPoint user experience, you should use animations and colors with parsimony. It is more important to make sure that you convey your message accurately than letting your PowerPoint explode slide after slide.

Now to the point. Here is one of the slides. You'll notice that the European and US flags (including Canada...) have been used to fill the bars. What is the added value of these flags? The 3D rotated chart is OK with me, but if all your slides are heavy, you'd better zero-base them all and keep it simple --see my previous post on KISS principles. Furthermore, the chart had been slightly window-dressed, extending its height, which exhilarates the audience's imagination but doesn't reflect the exact figures.

And here is the slide "After":

Nothing spectacular, as you see, rather conventional, I agree, but perfect readability!
I could have added animation, but the message here had to be simple, direct and clear. Goal met. If you have some challenging communication to get across and want to get the ball rolling, you know I'm all yours.

→ What can you learn from this?

Bells and whistles can be pathetic or look like toys. Avoid them.

Keep your message clear and unsophisticated.

Always review your slides to erase any multifaced intricacy
 

___________________________________

Other articles on CLARITY:

How to replace dumb lists with a set of smart shapes in minutes

How to avoid heavy slides that could end up with a 30MB presentation?

A laser-eye puts you ahead of the crowd

Combine high-contrast colours to make your slide stand out

Create strong headlines on top of all your slides

What kind of title page should you use?

Avoid long text. Why wouldn't you use light illustrations instead?

Trash cheap clip-art and circus-like transitions

All texts and pictures COPYRIGHT © 2005-2010, I&C LLC. All rights reserved.
SmilingResults is offered by I&C LLC. We are based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.