Presentation skills ~ tellingpeople

PowerPoint is a great tool - sometimes. But it can also be the worst tool in the world. When I teach people how to use it in their presentations, I often liken it to playing Mozart on the piano: anyone who’s technically competent can play the notes but it takes a musician to play the music. Anyone who can use a computer can use PowerPoint, but you need a flair for communication to use it well.

One of the biggest failings I notice in presentations is in the way people use colour. It’s common sense to use very different colours for your text and your background, but there are a couple of points to consider. Firstly, people suffering colour-blindness can have problems with contrasting colours. Secondly, what you see on your computer isn’t what an audience will see when it’s projected. Projectors bleed colour out and so do the sun and lights - lots. The strongest colour-contrasts are white or yellow on dark blue. Sadly, when these combinations are bleached out by the background stuff in the room, the contrast will be much, much less than you might expect, making some surprising things un-readable.

The tip?

Design for variation in brightness, not in colour. You can, of course, do both if you’re careful. The way to test is to check everything in shades of grey. If you can’t read easily it in “greyscale” your audience might not be able to read it, even in colour. It’s easy to flip between full colour and greyscale, whether you’re using PowerPoint, Keynote, OpenOffice or any other presentations-supporting-software.