[HN Gopher] A beginner's guide to making beautiful slides for yo...
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A beginner's guide to making beautiful slides for your talks
Author : Anon84
Score : 87 points
Date : 2024-02-18 15:39 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ines.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (ines.io)
| slily wrote:
| As cool as these look, I can't think of a single instance where
| pretty slides made a talk more interesting or memorable to me.
| Buying (okay, pirating) Photoshop might be worth it if you're
| pitching to investors/businesspeople, but if you're presenting at
| a conference focus on the content and as long as the slides
| strike the right balance between information density and
| readability, it'll be fine.
| snoman wrote:
| This is one of those instances where I wonder if there are
| different expectations in a more visually creative industry
| like Hollywood, fashion, or something where the appeal of your
| deck makes a meaningful difference.
| throwaway99989 wrote:
| Every year I spend as a developer I grow more fond of plain
| HTML websites like https://www.kleinbottle.com/ and slides
| like https://youtu.be/wGoM_wVrwng.
|
| Maybe the more I learn how exhausting and competitive it is
| to be a PM or designer, the more I want to differentiate
| myself from them, so I can chill and work on engineering.
| paulgb wrote:
| It's hard for me to think of an example where thoughtfully-
| designed slides _alone_ set a presentation apart, partly
| because good slides are often the result of someone clearly
| putting the time /thought into their presentation. But they can
| be the difference between a good presentation and a great one.
|
| For example, Gary Bernhardt's Birth and Death of JavaScript is
| one of my favorites and certainly benefits from having nicely-
| designed slides.
|
| https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
| layer8 wrote:
| They are good slides that visually communicate effectively,
| but that's not the same as "pretty" or "beautiful" (which are
| also much more subjective). Focusing on the latter doesn't
| achieve the former.
| 2cynykyl wrote:
| There is a general feeling in STEM that when someone's
| presentation is a bit too slick looking they actually undermine
| their message and raise suspicions about their motives...like
| people start to feel like they are hiding something. I guess
| the moral is just say what you need to say and don't over think
| it. Or maybe the moral is that it all depends on your audience.
| dheera wrote:
| The reality is people go to conferences (a) to network or (b)
| to boost their ego. Not to actually listen to talks. Especially
| in CS-adjacent fields, Github repos with working code are 100x
| more valuable than conference talks. So yeah, nobody really
| cares about conference talks or the slides except the loud
| bearded dude whose moves between rooms questioning the rigor of
| every talk.
| gnicholas wrote:
| These are ways to make beautiful slides. But "beauty" is not
| typically the measure I aim to optimize when prepping for a
| presentation. Given the tradeoff between spending time making the
| content great, and finding a beautiful font, I will always choose
| the former. If your job is to make beautiful slides (e.g., you
| work for someone who gives presentations, and you make the
| decks), then beauty is your north star.
|
| But for me, beauty is one small aspect of what makes a
| presentation good. I personally spend most of my time on the
| spoken content, and then build mostly-minimalist slides to
| accompany the content and help make it memorable. I spend near-
| zero time making the slides beautiful.
| adamhartenz wrote:
| It sounds like you are actually in a really good place to
| understand the science of graphic design. It is unfortunate the
| author used the term "beauty", because it make non-visual
| people assume something. The word is loaded, so skews how you
| think about the subject. But this is also how graphic design
| works. The visual look of your slide deck can skew how your
| audience perceives your content. Humans are extremely
| susceptible to this, so knowing a little bit can have massive
| benefits. The article does seem to cover the basics pretty
| well, which is only the tip of the iceberg.
| gnicholas wrote:
| What word would you have used in place of "beauty"?
|
| If the author had argued in favor of optimizing the visual
| look of your slide deck to maximize its impact on your
| audience (a rough paraphrasing of one of your sentences), I
| wouldn't have disagreed.
|
| But if her first bullet point had been about choosing/buying
| the right font, I'd have demurred (and I say this as someone
| whose livelihood focuses 100% on the visual presentation of
| text!).
| user_7832 wrote:
| I would have called it prettiness.
| mhd wrote:
| I thought it was just a couple of years ago when we started
| moving away from the age-old "three bullet points" formula to the
| "one slide per HUGE Helvetica word" template so beloved by TED
| talks.
|
| So I obviously can't say a lot about the style preferences, last
| presentations I held just used the company style.
|
| But hooh, that font section couldn't get any more generic, even
| mentioning Calibri. No hints at what font characteristics you're
| looking for, or good examples of that (I'd say that you're better
| off with something that has a lot of weights, and if it isn't
| already condensed/compressed, at least one option for that)
| KTibow wrote:
| You've confused Calibre with Calibri
| saltyoutburst wrote:
| My favourite meta-talk post is Zach Holman's 'The Talk on Talks'.
| https://zachholman.com/talk/the-talk-on-talks/ It covers some of
| the same basic design territory but also touches on delivery,
| Q&A, etc.
| 3abiton wrote:
| That was a nice reference, I found it more interesting than OP.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| These are interesting ideas for creative illustration, but I
| don't agree with the title that this is a guide for _beginners_.
| If you 've never done a presentation before, the most fundamental
| graphic design principle to keep in mind (long before you might
| start thinking about Photoshop plugins!) is consistency.
|
| I think that the first thing I would recommend for a beginner is
| to set the basic layout, typeface and background/foreground
| colours to something tasteful, perhaps also distinctive or using
| corporate colours if appropriate. These options will be under
| something like 'Styles' or 'Master Slide View' depending on the
| presentation software.
|
| Sometimes, it can feel to me like a presentation flits between
| styles, as if it has been assembled by copying-and-pasting slides
| piecemeal from other talks. Starting by setting the default
| style, however, keeps a thread of visual consistency there while
| you experiment. After that, you can add logos that look like
| embroidery, glitch effects and what have you, but it will look
| much less chaotic than the result of creating the special effects
| first. It will truthfully be decoration, because you've already
| got a solid visual foundation to build upon.
|
| If you'll excuse the vanity, following are the slides for a
| couple of my own presentations which I'm rather proud of :)
|
| https://media.libreplanet.org/mgoblin_media/media_entries/27...
|
| https://fosdem.org/2024/events/attachments/fosdem-2024-2719-...
| dheera wrote:
| The MOST unfortunate thing about slide presentations is that in
| many contexts (particularly academic talks, and investor pitches,
| among other things) is that people ask for your slides before or
| after the talk, as a substitute for listening during the talk.
|
| The best talks are those where the slides _supplement_ the talk
| and provide visuals for the talk, and aren 't trying to BE the
| talk. But these people above often ask for slides because they
| don't plan on listening but do still plan on judging you based on
| your talk that they didn't listen to, so you're forced to slap
| every piece of information on them.
|
| (I'm guilty of this too; many times I plan on attending an
| interesting virtual talk in my company but I get a meeting
| scheduled at the same time, so the best I can do is to open both
| the talk and the meeting at the same time, mute the audio on the
| talk and screenshot every slide of the talk while nodding in the
| meeting.)
|
| For this reason, good slides work for motivational and TED Talk
| speakers where you have undivided attention, but they don't work
| well in real business because people _plan_ to not listen during
| the talk.
| gnicholas wrote:
| This hints at the key problem, which is that there are two
| kinds of slide decks: those meant to accompany a live
| presentation, and those meant to be flipped through with no
| accompaniment.
|
| When the former are used for the latter purpose, they are near
| useless. When the latter are used for the former purpose, they
| are worse than useless.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| I love these guides. One that I want is excluding brutalism. I
| really can't stand it. At all.
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