I’m a fan of visual slides if you’re going to use PowerPoint (or Keynote or any of the other alternative slide-ware packages). There are times when bullet-points are the way to go, of course, but not many. And not as many as people seem to think!
The idea of avoiding the boring bullet-point-riddled slide seems to be catching on a bit, but there are a few mistakes that I’ve noticed people making in the presentations I’ve sat through recently. The most common mistake seems to be the idea that adding a gratuitous picture to the side of the bullet points somehow stops it being a bullet-point slide.
It doesn’t – it just makes it a bullet-point slide with a picture.
To add insult to injury, of course, you could make the picture nasty and common clip-art. That just makes it look even more like a token gesture. Or perhaps you find a semi-relevant picture, but the background is the wrong colour for the slide – just putting it onto the slide does nothing more than make the picture stand out like a sore thumb even more, showing up that you’ve not taken the five minutes you needed to take the background out or change your slide.
Please – you know who you are! If you’ve got a graphic on your slide, make it a graphic slide, not a bullet-point slide with a graphic.
Or I may just have to shoot you with one of your own bullet-points.
