Best Practices for Constructing Visual Presentations
Begin by asking yourself two questions: what is your presentation about? and, what do you want the audience to know or be able to do after they have seen & heard it?
After you decide what the presentation is about and what you want the audience to take away from it, you need to create a path to help you your audience get from one to the other: knowing what your presentation is about is not enough; you need to create steps to move your audience from beginning to end.
One way to do this is to create a script by telling the story of what you are presenting, or by creating an outline of main points, or by creating a visual story board. How you flesh out the journey from beginning to end, will depend on four things:
* what your topic is
*what you think your audience already knows about it
*what you want them to know about it
*how you want them to know about it.
Once you flesh out the story of the presentation, you need to think about the form of the presentation: what can be best presented with images? what needs to be put in words on slides? what can be put into a script to be spoken during the presentation? Things to bear in mind when creating your slides:
* The Contiguity Principle which states that images and words about those images should be presented as close together as possible for maximum learning for the audience.
* Less is More: do not overload slides with words, concepts, or visual information. You want important information to stand out and be memorable—not buried in a slide overrun with information.
* Set Expectations: You want the audience to know where they are going, so give them a brief map or overview of what will be discussed, explained, shown.
* Recap or summarize where you have been: before concluding, revisit main points or concepts it is important for the audience to remember/take away from the presentation.
Complied by Glynis Benbow-Niemier