Jeff “the Blog” Bonforte

We often hear, fewer slides is better. In my list of 20 tips, I have it as tip #10, suggesting that most presentations are better in the 5-8 slides range, 10-20 for really long, detailed discussions. In order to make shorter

presentations, you have to make better slides. Edward Tufte would say that we need to massively increase the fidelity of our slides…that is we need our slides to go “HD” (the image to the right is a classic Tufte HD chart example, in this case capturing Napoleon’s “March to Moscow”).

So to make a short presentation, we need to layer in more data, and we need to create a visual vocabulary for the presentation that can be used over and over to drive our plot forward (see tip #13 about “telling a story”).

Before I jump into my slide examples, a quick note. These are “white washed” versions of actual slides I created over the years. There is no more proprietary data, names have been changed, numbers have been obscured and revised, etc. So if things look generic, it is intentional.

In the slide above, I created a graphic representation of the technology strategy our team had executed from the previous year. This slide was critical within my group and our department. It looks simple, but there is a lot of information here, and I easily could layer on new information on to the slide. The colors were all selected purposefully, and these colors retained their meaning not just throughout this presentation, but across many presentations. This was part of the visual vocabulary we built and reused effectively for more than a year. Also, you will notice that there are photos running down the left side. These photos were to drive home the primary statement of the presentation: “We have remarkably diverse customers. One product cannot be all things to all people. We need to deliver the right experience for the right customer.

I could have layered in even more detail into the graphic. I could have sized all the boxes in accordance to effort, time to complete, by headcount, users or by revenue. I did do this in subsequent slides, but this basic diagram and the visual vocabulary it establishes was used over and over in this preso and throughout the year. In this case, I spent probably 10 minutes on this one slide alone.

Tell them what's important.

Don’t beat around the bush. Don’t be coy. Tell them what is important. You can’t have 10 things important in a presentation. Remember Al Gore and Steve Jobs…you can only really have 1-3 big points. I made this Cliff’s Notes slide and used it repeatedly to make sure I was 100% clear about what I want my audience to remember about my presentation. It is good for me to keep on track, and makes their life easier, too. This one has been sanitized, but the title wouldn’t stay this generic. Also, by using the Cliff’s Notes book, I not only gave a quick moment of entertainment, I gave them a visual trigger to drive home my points. Bullet point slides tend to do the opposite. They all run in together.

Adding fidelity to chart slides.

This slide is one of my favorite “chart” slides. I condensed a lot of charts into one slide. There are actually five charts on this page. I stripped out all sorts of unnecessary information to make them more simple to digest. I copied the formatting for the bar charts from Business Week. Notice that the pie chart colors correspond to the bar chart information below. I made a bold statement that another group in the company unequivocally needed my team to survive. I showed the annual growth, and the increasing dependence that team had to mine. The slide is heavy with data, and it is visually distinct. I didn’t make other slides that look exactly like it, to make sure they would say things like, “That relates back to what you said on the XYZ slide.” I really like it when my audience remembers each individual slide and even comes up with a way to refer to it: The Group XYZ slide” or “The Cliff Note’s slide”.

Colors matter.

I did a few things on this slide that were important and effective. This slide was actually a re-write of a standard annual planning slide the company used (actually a terrible table slide). I added the chart on Revenue per Employee to show the relative efficiency my team was achieving. In a big company, you have to show why your group is important if they aren’t in the “big three” revenue items in the company. For example, if you ran Gtalk at Google, you would really want to make your case on why you are important relative to web search or Gmail (if you are, in fact, important). The other thing I did was use two simple colors and then changed the shading to convey some information. In this case, the previous year revenue, the most “hard” fact on the page. The projected revenue used a gradient to show that this number was the least clear (I probably should have reversed the gradient to show that we were confident up to number $X, and optimistic from there. Also, I added more historical data than the standard planning slide I was given to show that we were breaking out of a slow growth phase that had become routine. I could have easily added a lot of additional information to this page, and I did when I presented to smaller teams, including specific revenue numbers, multiples and comparisons versus other teams in the company.

I didn’t show you the original slides. In every case, the slide I replaced was a “bullets-only” or “table-only” slide. They were ugly, boring and difficult to understand. It invited the presenter to hide behind the confusion and the audience to check out.

Too much text? Yes...intentionally in this case.

In this final slide example, I was asked to evaluate rolling out a new, global premium service…with no additional resources. In general, I was supportive of the new service, but I was very skeptical that it could be done with zero new heads to manage the business. In this case, I was listing all the things we were going to have to do well to be successful in launching and operating this new business. My point was “There is too much on this page for us to be comfortable.” The slide was a success. It wasn’t my prettiest slide (I hate those colors…but that was intentional too…I wanted something that broke from my previous visual vocabulary. This was not part of the plan. I called this the “unfunded mandate” slide

You can download all these example slides as PDFs here. Notice I am complying with my tip #12…send out PDFs not PPTs…after the meeting!