Ever endured bad PowerPoint? You know, the kind that drives companies to institute a 3-slide rule for events with dozens of presenters?
Next time you’re presenting, don’t expose your audience to death by PowerPoint. Strive for great images that move the story along. Instead of cramming 10 bullets on each slide, sprinkle in only necessary words (seriously, take out as many as you can).
Sound painful? Will people think less of you? Will they question your intelligence?
No way. They’ll remember you.
For inspiration on getting lean, check out William of Ockham, the 14th century Franciscian friar and logician for whom the Occam’s Razor principle is coined. Simplicity is preferred to complexity in design. For PowerPoint, that means less is more (including templates, whether by Microsoft or custom designed).
How do you know when you’re there? Try your next PowerPoint on a colleague. Ask for brutally honest feedback. See if your message(s) came through as intended. If not, refine. Do another beta. Don’t fill slides with text. You’ll kill your audience.
Albert Einstein may not have never given a PowerPoint presentation, but if he did, it would have been great based on this quote: ”Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
The same simple fundamentals apply to websites.
Here’s a link to a free chapter on simple web design available through Web Design By Scratch, a useful site for corporate marketers that adheres to the principal of Occam’s Razor.
