Effective Communication
Your Slides Suck
Edit
#presentation-skills
#visual-communication
#public-speaking
#user-experience-ux
#design-principles
#effective-communication
#typography
Summarized using AI

Your Slides Suck

Shane Becker • February 03, 2011 • San Pedro, CA

In this talk titled "Your Slides Suck" presented at LA RubyConf 2011 by Shane Becker, the main theme revolves around improving the effectiveness of presentation slides. Becker emphasizes that bad slides can detrimentally affect the audience's engagement and understanding of the content being presented. He shares his insights on how to design better slides for effective communication.

Key Points Discussed:

- Audience Perspective: Speakers should design slides with the audience in mind and remember their experience as attendees.

- Slide Design Principles:

- Use big text to ensure readability from all sections of a venue, especially at larger conferences.

- Provide less text on slides; avoid cramming information into a single slide. Each slide should communicate a singular idea clearly.

- Use high-contrast colors for better visibility. Light backgrounds with dark text and vice versa are generally more effective.

- Maintain a consistent layout throughout the presentation to facilitate comprehension and keep the audience oriented.

- Apply a visual hierarchy to guide the audience's focus on the main points.

- Limit the use of bullet points; if necessary, distribute them across multiple slides to avoid overwhelming the audience.

- Embrace the use of visual aids like images and charts to complement spoken content, rather than relying solely on text.

- Specific Examples: Becker points out several real-world presentations that failed or succeeded based on their slide designs. For instance, he critiques slides that are overstuffed with text or poorly contrasted visuals, and praises those that use distinct colors or images to enhance understanding.

- Fonts and Typography: He recommends using clear, legible fonts like Helvetica and discourages the use of overly decorative fonts, especially in slide presentations.

- Contact Information: Concludes by emphasizing the importance of sharing personal contact information or social media links on slides to facilitate future engagement with the audience.

Takeaways: By focusing on clarity, simplicity, and audience engagement in slide design, presenters can enhance the effectiveness of their talks and contribute positively to the overall experience at conferences or meetings. Becker's entertaining presentation style adds a relatable layer to his vital insights on presentation design.

Overall, the talk serves as a strong reminder of how critical effective slide design is to public speaking and audience engagement.

Your Slides Suck
Shane Becker • February 03, 2011 • San Pedro, CA

I've sat through years and years of bad slides and bad presentations. Often times the speaker and/or the content of the presentation is totally awesome, but the slides are horrible. Bad slides are bad. Bad slides bore, distract and confuse your audience. Bad slides even crash space shuttles. Srsly.

I'll enumerate a dozen ways that you can make your slides better for you, your audience and puppies. And space shuttles. We'll cover the good, the bad and the ugly. Names will be named. Punches will not be pulled.

And yes, I'm talking about you.

Help us caption & translate this video!

http://amara.org/v/FNkE/

LA RubyConf 2011

00:00:30.000 Who here is a grownup? Let's start with that. Okay, so liars whose hands are down.
00:00:37.239 Whose phone has been going off all day? Please turn it off. You know, let's all be honest here.
00:00:43.280 Come on, we're all grown-ups. Turn down your volume.
00:00:49.160 Um, and before we get started, Evan, come up here. We want to show off the new... we came up with this at Ruby.
00:00:54.879 This is the sort of secret handshake, sort of a Ruby nerd greeting.
00:01:00.199 Do it in slow motion. It goes fist bump, phone call. Try it out with your neighbors.
00:01:06.960 Act like you're a calic mass and peace be within you or whatever.
00:01:12.040 So this was a lightning talk that I originally gave at Goo up in San Francisco a few months ago.
00:01:17.119 And the short version is, there's all my slides. I've had the good fortune of working with some really bright people over the years and learning lots of stuff from them.
00:01:22.159 One of the lessons I learned was from Aaron Patterson, who you might know as Tender Love.
00:01:28.200 He was at Goo, sort of riffing on the previous year about how to give a good talk.
00:01:33.960 It comes down to three things: a provocative title, sexy pictures, and Ruby code.
00:01:40.479 So here’s my talk in three slides: I insult everyone with the title, there's a sexy picture of Aaron Patterson himself, thank you for that.
00:01:48.920 And there's Reidi's Instancy Vow method. So we're all done, we can go home, right?
00:01:55.280 So the real talk here: I'm Shane Becker, I go by Vegan Stage on the internet.
00:02:00.600 That's what my face looks like. I make websites for fun and for profit, sometimes for myself, sometimes for the man.
00:02:07.000 A quick sidebar here: I live in LA. Like most stories, it was about a girl. I moved here for the prospect of this girl who turned out to be batshit insane.
00:02:12.720 Did I break this thing? She's here now. Is it okay? Science, science. So the prospect of a job and a girl.
00:02:18.840 Well, the girl didn't work out, but that's alright. The job didn't initially work out either, and a few months later it did.
00:02:25.280 But that's in no short measure because of Kobe. So thank you for that, I’m still here.
00:02:31.440 Largely because of that job, and so on. Thank you, Kobe.
00:02:38.080 I literally had to stalk him. I waited outside the elevator till his smoke break and pinned him down for an interview, seriously.
00:02:43.439 I’ve made some stuff for the open sources. I used to live in Seattle, where I was part of Seattle RB.
00:02:50.200 Now down here, Evan and I have started LA Ruby.
00:02:56.280 You've probably heard of this today. It happens every Tuesday from 7 to 10 at blank spaces, which is Mid-Wilshire, Miracle Mile.
00:03:02.840 That’s the website. It's the opposite of the name, like G showed. Who has plans on Tuesday night?
00:03:10.360 Who has plans that isn’t going to this? Yes, okay. So everyone come to this. It's super simple.
00:03:16.120 We just hang out. We talk, we don’t talk, we code or don’t code, we talk or not talk for hours.
00:03:23.480 So the real short version of my talk is that bad slides are so bad they literally crash space shuttles.
00:03:30.200 Okay, so when you're up here or when you have the opportunity to be up here, remember what it's like to be out there.
00:03:38.080 Take the time to design for the audience. Your slides suck is maybe not the most positive title, so we'll call it making better slides.
00:03:44.280 These aren’t rules, of course, because I’m an anarchist. It’s just that there are so many bad slides in the world.
00:03:50.200 You’ve all seen them, let’s be honest, some today. Think of this as like a strongly worded letter.
00:03:57.600 In the sake of brevity or efficiency, imagine that everything I say, because I want to say some hard, fast sort of declarations about good and bad design.
00:04:05.080 So imagine everything is said like this: my humble opinion, I think it would be better if you did this instead of that.
00:04:10.160 But what do I know, right? So just imagine I'm saying it like that when I say this is horrible.
00:04:17.039 And also I should say that all these slides and people that I'm referencing in this talk, and that I might reference from today, I respect you as people.
00:04:23.120 I think you do interesting stuff. I care about what you’re talking about, which is why I want the slides to be better.
00:04:30.840 Because bad slides make me want to not pay attention. So the first question is always: Am I making a visual aid for speaking or am I really making some sort of documentation that should be a website?
00:04:41.520 If you end up with slides that have paragraphs, that’s probably not a slide.
00:04:47.400 If you have so many bullet points like this, that should probably not be slides at all.
00:04:52.720 Or if it is slides, it should maybe be multiple slides like this.
00:04:57.960 This one slide here could maybe be five or six slides.
00:05:05.080 So I’ll cover that more.
00:05:10.160 The number one thing you could do to make your slides better for this experience is to use big text.
00:05:17.039 And to make up for Brian not using the F-bombs, really big text.
00:05:23.120 So here’s the pattern I’m going to use: red background, which by the way, good job on the brightness of the projector to lightness ratio in this room.
00:05:30.840 So you can actually see colors and slides. A lot of hotel conferences are just totally washed out.
00:05:37.159 The red background is a bad example. The green background is a good example.
00:05:43.680 So this is a slide from Brian Ford's talk for RubyConf. This was his title slide.
00:05:50.280 It's tiny, so I suggest you do it really big. It’s pretty simple.
00:05:57.600 Here's a slide from my talk about activity streams. Again, a lot of unused space there.
00:06:02.200 And from, you know, this is a pretty small room but when you get into conferences with 300 people, the back row is twice as far away.
00:06:09.600 This becomes kind of small, so again just bump it up.
00:06:16.240 Here’s some good big clean simple slides. Here’s one of Yud.
00:06:22.280 What helps with big text is less text.
00:06:29.040 So when I see bullet points like this, I'm already reading the fourth one while you're still talking about the first one.
00:06:34.680 So I'm not thinking about what you want me to be thinking about, like this.
00:06:40.480 Plus I probably won't read that because the text is too small and I'm bored already.
00:06:47.040 Alright, you've seen slides like this. This was an awesome talk at an event aart up in Seattle last year.
00:06:54.000 Microsoft is actually doing pretty cool things with I9; they actually care about doing right by the web.
00:07:00.360 But this, you know, this whole thing could be a top right here, and they just crammed it all.
00:07:06.600 You know this guy, what’s his name, Matt Blaze, he um, this was his whole deck.
00:07:12.039 You could read it later or whatever, basically the conference required a PowerPoint deck from him upfront.
00:07:19.200 So he made a title slide like this, and then a final slide.
00:07:25.760 Again, you know, just lots of noise. Come on. That’s like four title slides.
00:07:32.160 Some good examples of instead of taking a u list of bullet points, you can make that one slide and style that differently.
00:07:38.640 You know, either a different background color or a different type.
00:07:45.200 Whatever, and then each bullet or each item in your list could be a separate slide.
00:07:51.640 And then again, here is a numbered version of a list, and that's obvious those are different slides.
00:07:58.280 Right, that this isn’t one big slide. That would be nine slides.
00:08:04.760 So here’s Jeffrey Zeldin, who knows a thing or two about design.
00:08:11.440 So he does R A one two three. When you have less text, it also provides interesting design opportunities.
00:08:17.760 So you can do stuff like this. It doesn't apply just to type.
00:08:24.479 If you have less or fewer objects or items or things on your slide, you have this clarity and the simplicity that provides interesting design.
00:08:31.960 This contrast issue is not, let's see... Oh yeah, there we go.
00:08:36.960 So even in a pretty good setup like this, pardon me.
00:08:43.440 Some colors don’t work well together. It’s even worse, you know, like I said, when the lights are brighter.
00:08:50.280 It's not, you know, dusk or whatever, and you don’t have a bright projector.
00:08:56.480 A lot of times that projector is, you know, another thirty feet back.
00:09:04.760 It’s spraying its light through a lit room, it's diffused, whatever.
00:09:11.520 So what I recommend to people is, turn your brightness all the way down on your laptop.
00:09:19.040 If you can make out your slide, you're doing alright.
00:09:26.760 For bonus points, if you go outside in the sun and you can still see what's going on, you know you're probably alright in these conditions.
00:09:32.560 This is a pretty slide, but in low light conditions it actually kind of falls apart.
00:09:39.839 Was anyone at RubyConf in San Francisco a couple of years ago?
00:09:47.120 This was Ryan Davis and Aaron Patterson's horribly terrible bad ideas, and this one was about Fubby.
00:09:53.000 You can’t actually tell there, but the right circle is like this puke yellow kind of color, and it says PHP inside of there.
00:09:59.600 They managed to put PHP inside of Ruby.
00:10:07.040 Dave Thomas also had this problem at RubyConf this year. He was talking about gender balance and was showing some pie charts.
00:10:14.120 That were blue and red, but in the lighting conditions you just really couldn't see the breakdown.
00:10:20.000 Basically each pie chart was just a solid circle, right?
00:10:27.280 This actually looks fine in this room; a lot of rooms, it doesn't.
00:10:34.560 I’ll touch upon this more later, but using a black background is pretty dangerous in projector settings.
00:10:40.560 A simple switch of just using a white background and black text helps the contrast a lot.
00:10:46.560 This one works because while it's white on black, it's big and bold enough that it doesn’t fall apart too much.
00:10:53.120 Classic, and of course black and white is always the safest bet.
00:10:58.280 Alright, so everyone knows that Ruby doesn't scale and Rails doesn't scale.
00:11:05.120 So slides about Ruby and Rails by transit property also don’t scale.
00:11:11.600 If you run your text all the way to the edge of the screen, it'll likely get cut off depending on the projector’s accuracy.
00:11:17.120 So use what is called the title safe area.
00:11:25.440 If anyone's been involved with film or animation, is this still working okay?
00:11:31.760 The red would be all the way at the edge of the monitor screen; whatever.
00:11:39.120 The yellow would be what's called the action safe area.
00:11:45.760 So any important action in your characters or whatever would happen in there.
00:11:50.720 But any type that you need people to actually read should be safely within this area.
00:11:56.160 This was even more of an issue when we had CRTs before flat screens, which would curve on the edge.
00:12:04.280 You would lose a lot of pixels over there, so avoid the edges.
00:12:10.640 Here is an exaggerated example. Aside from being small text, the stuff at the top and the bottom gets cut off.
00:12:17.200 Use big text.
00:12:26.080 By the way, I didn't know that Giles was going to be doing the biggie references, and I have one too.
00:12:32.840 Say spinning cheese real down there.
00:12:39.360 So like big text, use big pictures.
00:12:46.160 You know, the Boston Globe understood the value of big pictures so much that they dedicated a whole photo blog to really awesome pictures.
00:12:52.560 Full screen, you know, it's like 900 to 960 pixels wide or so.
00:12:58.720 So if you're going to use screenshots, use them full screen.
00:13:05.040 Or if you want to show an image of a laptop or whatever, make it big.
00:13:12.120 MailChimp screenshots, and if the movements or placement of your content don’t matter, don’t move your content.
00:13:18.480 You know, don't make it hard for me to pay attention, right?
00:13:28.480 This talk was otherwise awesome, you know, every bit of type was in the top left corner.
00:13:34.960 So you always look there for the headings. But I think just because this photo didn’t work well with the top left.
00:13:41.440 Because that’s where their face was, he moved it down to the bottom left.
00:13:48.240 Boo. Ryan Davis is such an awesome dude, but his talk at Goo had these not awesome slides.
00:13:56.520 Just stuff everywhere. You know, I imagine a teenager’s bedroom when I look at these.
00:14:03.040 To sort of compound the problem, all these sort of animated into place and they weren't, you know, top left down.
00:14:10.280 They sort of like randomly came in. So it was like TDD, rake, incremental surge, you know, it's all over the place.
00:14:16.200 So keep it the same basically, so here’s some labels or headings are always in the same place.
00:14:23.440 More example, top left, easy to read. These are sort of right on the edge of good in my mind.
00:14:30.000 Because some of these are really long, like this bottom right example.
00:14:37.360 It’s such a long heading that in order to make all of these the same size of type, he had to make them all smaller.
00:14:43.760 If he could have shortened that one and maybe the top right, he could have made the whole font size bigger.
00:14:50.560 And again, here’s the one earlier from the washing machine picture. This is how the rest of his presentation was.
00:14:56.760 The title in the top left corner.
00:15:06.000 Alright, so all of my slides, like all my section headings, have been black on white.
00:15:12.760 A lot of times the presentation will be that way, like every slide will be black text on white background or vice versa.
00:15:18.760 In order to sort of mix it up for me visually, you know, to keep me interested in the audience,
00:15:25.040 use different background colors, different color combinations.
00:15:30.840 You can group them, you know, use sections in your talk.
00:15:37.680 Say, like, okay, right now we're talking about Active Record, and all the Active Record slides are in green.
00:15:44.840 And now we're talking about testing. So all the testing slides are red or whatever.
00:15:50.760 So you can break up the sections of your talk into different colors, so we can tell when we've moved on to something else.
00:15:58.760 This is just one of the default Kyote templates. Pretty boring. You've seen decks like this where every single slide is like this.
00:16:05.679 Right? That gets old fast.
00:16:12.360 Here’s a couple more from Jeff Zeldin.
00:16:19.760 The one on the left is the sort of like section heading, and on the right was how each slide in that section.
00:16:27.200 Here’s Evan Phoenix from RubyConf.
00:16:34.360 He was talking about developers, hard to tell there, but they are green.
00:16:41.040 And then when he talked about Ruinas, they were kind of purple.
00:16:48.160 These are purple, yes. So there was like one, two, you know, right after each other.
00:16:55.520 You know, stuff kind of in place you tell by the color that you can't see.
00:17:01.840 Um, who did this earlier? I want to say maybe Childes? You in here?
00:17:08.480 Childes, there you go.
00:17:14.480 Um, I feel like there was a table, maybe whatever.
00:17:20.720 So anyhow, forget I said G's name. I’ll bring him up later.
00:17:27.640 Um, humans are really good at sort of visual pattern recognition.
00:17:34.280 You know that we can tell the difference between the silhouette of a tree or rock and a mammoth or saber-toothed tiger.
00:17:40.720 Evidence that we're good at pattern recognition, you know, we’re still alive.
00:17:46.640 So we're good at tables that are simple, right? You know, 2x2 or maybe 3x3.
00:17:52.000 But when we get into big tables, like this, recognize the pattern there?
00:17:57.760 Right? You know, what's going on with the temperatures of planets?
00:18:05.199 So instead of this 7 by 8, I'll just let a simmer first.
00:18:13.520 So instead of this big table of 7 by 8, maybe you could have seven or eight charts.
00:18:20.160 I forget which column this was, but yellow is clearly down to the left.
00:18:26.560 Or, I'm sorry, down to the right, whatever that means in this case.
00:18:33.440 So it's easier to see the patterns when you're talking about how good files I/O are.
00:18:40.199 This was the slide at Goo that inspired this idea, and Blake spent most of his talk on this one slide.
00:18:46.280 This was like the guts of his talk.
00:18:53.760 And while he was still talking about Ruby and Erlang, I was down here in Pearl.
00:19:01.000 And, you know, J again, not listening to a word he had to say.
00:19:08.560 Plus, it's just like, it's hard to recognize patterns, and it's like, also his C1 to 10 stuff was hilarious.
00:19:16.080 So, you know, make yourself charts if it’s numerical stuff comparing things.
00:19:24.560 Here’s another one from Ryan and Aaron’s talk about bad videos.
00:19:31.280 And you know, they were those were intentionally poorly designed.
00:19:37.440 That was part of their stick. But I've seen real slides like this that weren't ironic.
00:19:44.560 Even if it doesn’t have borders on the columns and rows, it's still tabular data.
00:19:50.440 And I’ll show that to me in a chart.
00:19:57.600 The one case where it is somewhat okay to show numbers is like this.
00:20:04.400 This is probably too small but sort of actual statistics when you ultimately follow them by a chart.
00:20:10.399 Illustrating, you know, it’s like, but I sort of glaze over when I see a lot of zeros.
00:20:18.080 And my brain is a little dyslexic, is this good or bad? What direction does this go?
00:20:26.080 It's up to the right.
00:20:34.160 So here’s another good chart. You know, we have these four lines of stuff over time.
00:20:41.760 And while I'm talking, I want to illustrate this.
00:20:48.479 The green one has a very different growth curve.
00:20:54.559 So what you can do is sort of highlight it there, that clear there.
00:21:01.439 So you gray back everything else and just focus on that.
00:21:08.320 Typically, the actual numbers don’t matter.
00:21:14.679 You know if it's like 1.2 or 1.7 doesn’t matter to me, I want to know the pattern.
00:21:21.039 So be fuzzy about your charts when you can.
00:21:27.720 You know that sort of helps the noisiness of your slide.
00:21:34.520 Just show me like, oh, you know, in 2006 in half, the growth went sort of really up and not so much to the right.
00:21:40.640 Okay, so if you know me, I like fonts, to say that.
00:21:47.520 So whatever you use, I don't care. Just use a good one.
00:21:55.040 You know, make it clear, and you know, clean, very bold, easy to read.
00:22:01.600 I like Helvetica, tightly curved.
00:22:07.840 Possible, my man!
00:22:13.080 I've got some paintings for you.
00:22:19.200 Who was that? Okay, let’s talk about some paintings.
00:22:25.280 I have a t-shirt that says Health Medica Museo is the current hotness. You've surely seen it on websites.
00:22:31.920 Especially Museo Slab. The maker of this font provides a couple free weights, free versions.
00:22:38.880 Brian used Comic Sans up at Goo.
00:22:45.680 Um, today he used Cooper Black, and there's also a t-shirt for that.
00:22:56.800 Decom, which is Kivon, who used to run the New York Times website or the design of the New York Times.
00:23:07.440 I'm not affiliated with those products at all.
00:23:12.640 So don’t use, um, or whatever this is, or this, definitely not that.
00:23:18.880 Yeah, I realized I haven't said it; I'm so sorry.
00:23:24.560 So don’t use Comic Sans!
00:23:30.440 Right? I'm sorry, Comic Sans. Do use Comic Sans. Don’t use Comic Sans.
00:23:36.800 Um, you know, Brian did today. That was for...
00:23:41.840 Yeah, but that is all Kobe's fault for spelling your name.
00:23:49.040 Um, I'm not actually a big fan of the serif fonts in general, but especially for slides when contrast and lighting are issues.
00:23:56.520 Because all the thins, all the like the details of serifs get lost easily.
00:24:02.240 Then you end up with like a curve and a, you know, a little foot.
00:24:09.520 And it's like, that could be any combination of letters.
00:24:16.600 And do us all a favor and don't use the default fonts in Keynote.
00:24:22.760 It's Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans.
00:24:28.640 Yeah. Okay, way you win. Please don’t use it.
00:24:37.120 We’ve seen it in almost every presentation today, right?
00:24:43.600 So mix it up, please.
00:24:49.760 I want to say that overwhelmingly the slides have been good today.
00:24:56.280 I’ve been pretty impressed. In the macro, things are better than normal.
00:25:02.960 This guy Jesse, we’ll say, he made a slide deck which is free on SlideShare somewhere.
00:25:08.560 Called Steel Presentation. It’s really good, and we overlap a lot in our opinions about presentation design.
00:25:17.160 He suggests using a family of fonts, right?
00:25:25.240 So this is Museo, and there’s a light and a medium and a bold.
00:25:31.920 You don’t have to try and use Georgia and Helvetica for some contrast.
00:25:38.720 You could use the varying weights of the same font.
00:25:44.560 Museo provides a lot of weights as well.
00:25:49.840 Some presenters even have a whole slide about their fonts.
00:25:57.520 I think Tom Codes makes some of the best slides I've ever seen. That's an older slide of his as well.
00:26:05.440 Brian Ford even hand-wrote all his slides in sort of honoring Y at RubyConf.
00:26:11.920 And that's totally cool as long as you can read them.
00:26:17.760 I think that's pretty readable. This room is the kind of room where this one is especially important.
00:26:23.600 Because if you're sitting in the back of the room or behind someone with a big head, or someone who's very tall like Evan,
00:26:30.760 you can't see the stuff on the bottom of slides.
00:26:36.400 Unless you're in a room that has tiered seating or there's a very tall stage.
00:26:41.680 What was that called? A screen?
00:26:48.240 All the stuff on the bottom gets lost.
00:26:54.640 Again, here’s some older Tom Codes slides.
00:27:00.800 Where, you know, big screenshots, but the labels for those screenshots were all at the bottom.
00:27:07.760 Right? You know, get lost in this setting.
00:27:14.320 Um, this is from Steel Presentation. I think this is a bad example to use for bad examples.
00:27:20.640 Because he made it for you to look at on your computer.
00:27:26.560 Presentations that you look at on your computer are not the same as presentations that you present on screen.
00:27:33.120 Right? So while these headings are very big and bold,
00:27:39.080 half of each heading is sort of below the fold, if you will.
00:27:45.040 All of the heading is below the fold of this one.
00:27:53.120 And the most important thing on this next slide is in the least awesome spot.
00:27:59.600 Right? You know, it’s like, for the people behind the second row, there’s a bit of text that says important.
00:28:05.840 Wi over everything else, including inline styles, which is like the point of this whole slide.
00:28:12.600 Is to illustrate like which of these two rules wins.
00:28:19.720 I wanted to do more of this today and actually like take pictures of slides as they were happening to reference them,
00:28:26.960 but it just wasn't really happening.
00:28:34.800 So this is Evan Dorne from earlier. Sorry for only picking on you.
00:28:42.720 I guess, but it's okay where are you. I don't mind, okay.
00:28:48.320 Yeah, so that talk was awesome by the way. Um, there were a handful of slides where, like, the punch line of the slide was down here.
00:28:54.320 Right? And I was doing a lot of this, and it sort of gets tiring after a while.
00:29:00.840 Oh, don't put it down.
00:29:07.600 Here’s a couple of Evan’s slides from RubyConf.
00:29:13.760 You know, code samples just on the top, we’ll cover code samples more in a minute.
00:29:20.400 Yuda did the same thing. Title slides are important.
00:29:27.920 Because when you're about to talk and the room is sort of shuffling in, they're flipping the lights.
00:29:34.560 To get people to sit down, this is the thing that's going to be on screen.
00:29:40.480 You know, you sort of set the mood, a little candle light and some sweet yacht rock on your title slide.
00:29:46.480 And then when you save your slides to PDF and put them up on SlideShare,
00:29:52.160 this is going to be the thumbnail when confreaks makes the video of the slide.
00:29:58.720 This will be the thumbnail, right? So if you have your company logo and your copyright, and or you know, all that crap on the.
00:30:06.960 You know at 200 by 100, it's just gobbling C, so make this slide, you know, clear and impactful as well.
00:30:12.480 My title slide was not the best thing in the world. I'll show you some better examples here.
00:30:19.300 So I would not say this is awesome. Um, I would turn this into maybe like six or seven slides to walk through them.
00:30:26.640 You know, like at the beginning, when I said, I would have said like, I'm Marco.
00:30:33.360 I work, you know, at this place, which is here, you know, I make this saying.
00:30:39.680 Here’s the URLs, what I walk through.
00:30:47.280 Um, here's a good one.
00:30:55.920 You know, uh, what am I talking about and what is the sort of focus of that thing.
00:31:02.320 Here’s Tom's title slide. So it’s very like sort of has a visual hierarchy.
00:31:10.240 You know, like the title is the important thing. You can also tell who's talking about it, but that’s secondary.
00:31:16.960 And he also, what does it say? Uses a few sort of design elements on the title slide that he references later.
00:31:22.720 This one's a sort of good exception to that.
00:31:29.920 Like don’t put too much stuff on the front or the first slide because when you save this out as a thumbnail,
00:31:38.480 the bits down below that aren't really important are sort of lost.
00:31:44.440 And that's okay, but the thing in the middle is still readable at, you know, 200 by 100.
00:31:50.320 But from this one slide, we can tell that Chris Minina talked about activity streams.
00:31:57.080 In at South by Southwest in Austin on Mar 13th.
00:32:02.720 So everyone’s done a pretty good job about this today.
00:32:10.640 You know, I think part of the speaking experience is about the speaker.
00:32:17.520 You know, it's if this was just about Vagrant, then I could just go to the Vagrant website.
00:32:24.160 Right? But I'm, you know, sharing this sort of moment with Mitch as he talks about it.
00:32:29.280 I'm learning things from him, and you know there's a little bit of performance.
00:32:36.720 But also, there are the sorts of opportunities that come from speaking.
00:32:42.480 Right? So, you know, both good or bad or whatever, or you know, sometimes it's about a job.
00:32:49.440 Sometimes it’s like other collaborators or friends or whatever.
00:32:55.480 So if I just saw this presentation or I downloaded it later, and there was no clear way to get a hold of me,
00:33:02.240 I just like, oh, this Vagrant thing, I don’t know how to Google, I will never find this guy.
00:33:09.560 So make sure you sign your work.
00:33:16.080 I remember watching the Bob Ross painting show on PBS when I was a kid.
00:33:23.520 And he would, you know, do these awesome paintings.
00:33:32.640 Imagine if that one was on like velvet, by the way, such a nice wave.
00:33:38.800 Yeah, such a nice wave. It's nice, it’s a nice friendly White House.
00:33:46.080 Um, so at the end he would, you know, work his way through the painting.
00:33:52.160 And always like in the last couple minutes, he would sign his work.
00:33:57.840 And he always made a thing about you’ve got to sign your work, and he always did.
00:34:03.840 Unfortunately, his signature is in the bottom right, so people in the back, it's down there.
00:34:11.280 Um, yeah, bottom left. Well, I'm in a helicopter looking in the mirror, so it's my right.
00:34:17.680 So, you know, he would always sign his work. Right?
00:34:24.000 So you paint a cabin in the wilderness in wintertime, sign your work.
00:34:31.840 Uh, don't do it like this because that's just a bad slide.
00:34:37.680 Anyhow, um, it’s who's doing that? I want to be the cranky old professor.
00:34:45.600 Um, so this was a pretty good one.
00:34:52.160 You know, it's like a picture of the dude, uh, his real name and, you know, contact information.
00:34:58.080 That is relevant that we actually use. Like, well, no one uses Buzz.
00:35:05.280 But the Twitter handle, he works for Google, so he maybe had to do.
00:35:11.440 But you know, his Twitter's on there, right?
00:35:17.680 Here’s a great one, right?
00:35:24.480 So you’re, I hate saying the sort of buzzwords, but like this really helps this dude's personal brand.
00:35:30.600 You know, after this awesome talk, it's clear what his face looks like.
00:35:38.000 When you run into him in the bar, you can buy him a drink or, you know, a juice, or whatever.
00:35:45.920 And his name and his sort of title and in the corner, there’s some like Twitter.
00:35:52.480 Whatever. Um, you can sign your work however you want, right?
00:35:59.680 There’s sexy Aaron Patterson again, or maybe just do your Twitter handle.
00:36:07.920 Right? So just, you’re not going to hurt my feelings either way.
00:36:14.640 But did anyone start following me after I put my Twitter name on the screen?
00:36:22.480 Awesome, that’s the first time that that hasn’t happened.
00:36:28.280 Um, time I presented and I gave my, you know, Twitter handle, my phone started buzzing while I was speaking.
00:36:34.920 Right? So put your Twitter name up there, you know, put your blog up there, whatever.
00:36:40.720 Um, GitHub, of course, works in these kinds of situations.
00:36:46.600 But like, give me some way to get a hold of you and to like follow your progress.
00:36:53.920 Um, so we’re all the Nerds, and the Nerds like the codes.
00:37:00.520 This is where I’ll mention Giles. Giles had a few code samples.
00:37:06.720 Did you construct your whole presentation on the iPad, or did you just deliver it on iPad?
00:37:12.760 Like, 90% iPad? Some... It was so... I’ve done that before.
00:37:19.760 And there are definitely things that are harder to do on the iPads.
00:37:26.560 Like taking a screenshot and cropping it or, you know, like whatever.
00:37:32.480 So there’s some limitations there.
00:37:38.000 Overwhelmingly, it’s fin expense, but code samples are one of the places that sort of falls down.
00:37:44.320 Um, so like everything else, use high contrast.
00:37:51.760 This room is really booming. I mean, it’s awesome. No, this room is awesome.
00:37:58.080 But as far as my examples about contrast goes, this room doesn’t apply.
00:38:06.160 So, actually there were a couple that were hard to read that were I used a dark background in my terminal.
00:38:12.320 I use a dark background in my text editor, most of you do too, I’m guessing.
00:38:19.360 Do the opposite for your presentation, which a quick presenter sidebar.
00:38:25.680 If you're ever in a situation that doesn’t have good contrast like this,
00:38:32.480 you run into a slide that you can't read, like the red text on the black background, right?
00:38:39.760 And that’s important to your talk, and you can't sort of audible around it.
00:38:46.480 What you can do is, at least in OS X, there's command option control 8, it will invert your colors.
00:38:53.120 Right? So you’re like, oh crap, people can’t see this, you hop out of Keynote, out of presentation mode, you do command option control 8.
00:39:01.680 And then, yeah, so now it’s inverted.
00:39:06.760 Colors cost you a microphone.
00:39:14.040 Sience, what's that?
00:39:20.800 Yeah, so here's a good example of bad contrast.
00:39:27.680 This was the Ruby on Rails ropes course at RailsComp in Baltimore.
00:39:33.840 Which I wasn't there but the slide deck looked really great.
00:39:40.280 You know, had lots of great information in it.
00:39:46.240 But you know, I don’t think they presented it on a projector screen.
00:39:52.480 So they probably had some contrast issues.
00:39:58.920 Also, aside from contrast, it’s good to use big point size.
00:40:05.280 And, uh, less code.
00:40:12.040 You know, show the least amount of code to illustrate your point.
00:40:18.880 If you can’t show less than this, then maybe you can.
00:40:25.440 Walk through this code in three chunks.
00:40:31.760 Say, like, this is the method I'm talking about; it's 30 lines. I'm going to talk about this conditional up top and then, you know, walk through a few slides.
00:40:53.000 But do it like this.
Shane Becker
@veganstraightedge
Explore all talks recorded at LA RubyConf 2011
+5