Preparation Process
10
VISUALS
Those Slides Hurt!
In the twenty-first century we have the ability to supplement the spoken word with a dazzling array of technologies that, done right, may take a talk to a whole new level. Photographs, illustrations, elegant typography, graphs, infographics, animation, video, audio, big data simulations â all can dial up both the explanatory power of a talk and its aesthetic appeal.
Despite this, the first question to ask yourself is whether you actually need any of it. Itâs a striking fact that at least a third of TEDâs most viewed talks make no use of slides whatsoever.
How can that be? Surely a talk plus images is always going to be more interesting than just a talk? Well no, actually. Slides move at least a little bit of attention away from the speaker and onto the screen. If the whole power of a talk is in the personal connection between speaker and audience, slides may actually get in the way of that.
Now, it is certainly not the case that there is a zero-sum attention tradeoff between screen and speaker. What is being shown onscreen often occupies a different mental category than what is being said. Aesthetic versus analytical, for example. Nonetheless, if the core of your talk is intensely personal, or if you have other devices for livening up your talk â like humor or vivid stories â then you may do better to forget the visuals and just focus on speaking personally to the audience.
And for every speaker, the following is true: Having no slides at all is better than bad slides.
Having said that, the majority of talks do benefit from great slides, and for some talks, the visuals are the absolute difference between success and failure.
TED was originally a conference devoted purely to technology, entertainment, and design, and the presence of designers quickly fostered the expectation that slides would be elegant and impactful. Arguably, that tradition is a core reason why TED Talks took off.
So what are the key elements to strong visuals?
They fall into three categories:
⢠Revelation
⢠Explanatory power
⢠Aesthetic appeal
Letâs handle those in turn.
REVEAL!
The most obvious case for visuals is simply to show something thatâs hard to describe. Presenting the work of most artists and photographers of course depends on doing this. An explorer revealing a voyage or a scientist unveiling a discovery can also use visuals in this way.
Edith Widder was part of the team that first captured the giant squid on video. When she came to TED, her entire talk was built around that moment of revelation. When the incredible creature eventually appeared onscreen, the audience nearly jumped out of its skin. But use of images for revelation doesnât have to be as dramatic. The key is to set the context, prime the audience, and then . . . BAM! Let the visuals work their magic. Run them full-screen, with minimal adornment.
EXPLAIN!
A picture is worth a thousand words (even though it takes words to express that concept). Often the best explanations happen when words and images work together. Your mind is an integrated system. Much of our world is imagined visually. If you want to really explain something new, often the simplest, most powerful way is to show and tell.
But for that to work, there needs to be a compelling fit between what you tell and what you show. Sometimes a speaker will hit the audience with a slide of immense complexity. Perhaps he is unconsciously trying to impress with the sheer scope and nuance of his work. As he continues churning out the words, the audience is desperately scanning the slide, trying to figure out how to match what is being said with what they are looking at.
The key to avoiding this is to limit each slide to a single core idea. Some speakers, and especially scientists, seem to have the unconscious operating assumption that they should minimize the number of slides, therefore cramming a ton of data onto each one. This may have been true in days when slides were physical things that you had to load into a slide projector. Today, though, the cost of ten slides is the same as the cost of one. The only thing thatâs limited is the time you have to deliver your talk. So an overly complex slide that might take 2 minutes to explain could be replaced with three or four simpler slides that you can click through in the same amount of time.
TEDâs Tom Rielly speaks about the need to manage cognitive load:
With a talk and slides you have two streams of cognitive output running in parallel. The speaker needs to blend both streams into a master mix. Talking about theoretical physics has a high cognitive load. So does a slide with dozens of elements. In these circumstances, the audience memberâs brain has to decide whether to focus on your words, your slides, or both, and itâs mostly involuntary. So you must design where attention is going and make sure a high cognitive load on a slide doesnât fight with what youâre saying.
Similarly, it doesnât make sense to leave a slide onscreen once youâve finished talking about it. Hereâs Tom again.
Just go to a blank, black slide and then the audience will get a vacation from images and pay more attention to your words. Then, when you go back to slides, they will be ready to go back to work.
If your goal is one key idea per slide, then it makes sense to consider whether anything more can be done with a slide to highlight the point it is trying to make. This is especially true with graphs and charts. If youâre talking about how rainfall in February is always greater than in October, and you show a graph of annual rainfall, why not give the audience the gift of highlighting February and October in different colors?
And if you then go on to make a comparison between March and November, do that with a separate build or on a separate slide with those months differentiated. Donât leave it all crammed on one slide.
David McCandless is a master at turning data into understanding by the use of elegant slides. At TEDGlobal in 2010, for example, he showed two slides. The first was titled WHO HAS THE BIGGEST MILITARY BUDGET? It showed ten squares of different sizes, each square representing a country, in proportion to the size of their budgets. The US, of course, was the largest by far.
The second slide, however, showed squares representing military budget as a percentage of GDP. And suddenly the US is in eighth place, behind Myanmar, Jordan, Georgia, and Saudi Arabia. In just two slides, your worldview is sharpened dramatically.
Other speakers still seem to believe that you enhance the explanatory power of your slides by filling them with words, often the same words that they plan to utter. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Those classic PowerPoint slide decks with a headline followed by multiple bullet points of long phrases are the surest single way to lose an audienceâs attention altogether. The reason is that the audience reads ahead of the speaker, and by the time the speaker covers a specific point, it feels old hat. When we see speakers come to TED with slide decks like this, we pour them a drink, go and sit with them at a computer monitor, and gently ask their permission to delete, delete, delete. Maybe each bullet point becomes its own slide; many phrases are reduced to a single phrase; theyâre replaced by an image; or they are deleted altogether.
The point is there is no value in simply repeating in text what you are saying on stage. Conceivably, if you are developing a point over a couple of minutes, it may be worth having a word or a phrase onscreen to remind people of the topic at hand. But otherwise, words on the screen are fighting your presentation, not enhancing it.
Even when a text slide is simple, it may be indirectly stealing your thunder. Instead of a slide that reads: A black hole is an object so massive that no light can escape from it, youâd do better with one that reads: How black is a black hole? Then youâd give the information from that original slide in spoken form. That way, the slide teases the audienceâs curiosity and makes your words more interesting, not less.
When you think about it, itâs fairly simple. The main purpose of visuals canât be to communicate words; your mouth is perfectly good at doing that. Itâs to share things your mouth canât do so well: photographs, video, animations, key data.
Used this way, the screen can explain in an instant what might take hours otherwise. At TED, our favorite proponent of explanatory visuals is Hans Rosling. Back in 2006, he unveiled an animated graphic sequence that lasted just 48 seconds. But in those 48 seconds he transformed everyoneâs mental model of the developing world. And hereâs the thing: If you havenât seen it, I canât actually explain it to you. To try would take several paragraphs, and even then I wouldnât be close. Thatâs the whole point. It had to be shown on a screen. So next time youâre near a computer, Google âHans Rosling: The best stats youâve ever seen.â Watch and marvel. (The 48-second clip starts at 4:05.)
Not everyone can be a Hans Rosling. But everyone can at least ask themselves the question, Are visuals key to explaining what I want to say? And, if so, how do I best combine them with my words so that theyâre working powerfully together?
DELIGHT!
An often overlooked contribution of visuals is their ability to give a talk immense aesthetic appeal.
It amazes me that visual artists will often restrict what they show to just a tiny fraction of their work. Yes, concepts in a talk need to be limited. But images? Not so much. The mistake is to assume that you have to explain every image. You donât. If you had invited a prized audience into your own vast exhibition hall to see your work, but you only had time to focus on a single gallery, you would nonetheless first lead them quickly through the rest of the hall, if only to take their breath away and expand their understanding of your broader body of work. With images, a 5-second viewing, even without any accompanying words, can have impact. If itâs so easy to offer such a gift to the audience, why withhold it?
There are numerous ways to structure a talk that can allow moments of visual indulgence that will significantly increase the audienceâs sense of delight, even when the topic itself isnât necessarily beautiful.
The designer and TED Fellow Lucy McRae packed dozens of intriguing, gorgeous images and videos into her talk, all of which generated their own sense of wonder â even when she was talking about body odor.
Likewise, the graphic style of a presentation, with elegant font choices, illustrations, and/or custom animations, can make it irresistible.
These are some core principles. But with visuals, the devil is in the details. To take us a little deeper, let me invite back to the page Tom Rielly, a man for whom bad visuals are a source of physical pain. Tom, over to you!
Tom Rielly writes:
Great! Letâs start with the tools youâll use.
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