cbrock84 Presentation design
Decks
The deck is not the talk. Slides that contain the argument make the speaker redundant and the reader confused. Decide which artifact you are making — a spoken-support deck or a read-alone document — because they have opposite rules and the hybrid fails at both.
One idea per slide. If a slide needs a sub-argument, it is two slides. The cost of an extra slide is zero; the cost of a crowded one is that nothing on it lands.
Structure carries more than styling:
- Open with the change in the world that makes this matter now.
- State the problem in the audience's terms, not yours.
- The argument, in the smallest number of steps that hold.
- The evidence — one chart per claim, not a dashboard.
- The ask, stated explicitly. A deck that ends without an ask was a briefing.
On slides: headline states the takeaway, not the topic — "Churn concentrates in month two," not "Churn analysis." If the reader only reads headlines, they should get the argument.
Charts: one message each, labeled directly rather than through a legend, with the axis honest. Strip everything that is not carrying information.
Board decks and conference talks follow different rules
The structure above is shaped for persuasion to a room you are in. Two of the artifacts this skill is asked for are not that.
A board deck is read before the meeting, not presented at it. It goes out days ahead and is expected to be read, so it has to stand alone — which makes it the read-alone document, not the spoken-support deck.
- Separate what is for decision from what is for information, and say which is which on the page. A board meeting spent walking through updates is a board meeting with no decisions in it.
- Keep the format identical period over period. The value of a board pack is comparison across time, and a redesign destroys it. Same sections, same order, same metrics with the same definitions.
- Lead with what is not working. A pack that buries the problem on page nineteen costs credibility permanently once someone finds it, and they do.
- Bring the open question, not only the resolved one. A board shown finished thinking cannot help and eventually stops trying.
For how the meeting itself should be run and what belongs at which cadence, see
operations:operating-cadence; for what has to be formally recorded, legal-risk:corporate-governance.
A conference talk is a performance with visual support, and it fails in the opposite direction from a board pack.
- Fewer words than feels safe. Slides are read faster than you speak, so text competes with you and wins. Images, one phrase, a single number.
- Design for the back of a large room and for the bottom third being invisible behind heads.
- The talk has to survive the projector — assume poor contrast and bad color reproduction, and never rely on a subtle tonal difference to carry meaning.
- Nothing on a slide should require the handout to be understood. If the deck will be shared afterward, that is a second artifact, not the same one.
One-pagers
A single surface has one job: get one idea across at a glance, and reward a closer read.
- Establish a focal point immediately — largest element, most contrast, positioned where the eye lands first.
- Hierarchy in three levels at most. More reads as noise.
- Everything aligns to a grid, including the things that look like exceptions.
- Design for where it will actually be read. A page printed and handed across a table, attached to an email, and projected in a room impose different minimum type sizes, and the one you designed on screen at full width is usually the least representative of the three.
Social graphics, carousels and infographics are a different job with different constraints — the
feed decides how they are seen. marketing:visual-content covers them.
Never
- Read the slide aloud.
- Use a chart type because it is interesting rather than because it fits the comparison.
- Let a template's layout decide your argument's structure.