Presentation design

Decks

The deck is not the talk. Slides that contain the argument make the speaker redundant and the reader confused. Decide which artifact you are making — a spoken-support deck or a read-alone document — because they have opposite rules and the hybrid fails at both.

One idea per slide. If a slide needs a sub-argument, it is two slides. The cost of an extra slide is zero; the cost of a crowded one is that nothing on it lands.

Structure carries more than styling:

1. Open with the change in the world that makes this matter now.
2. State the problem in the audience's terms, not yours.
3. The argument, in the smallest number of steps that hold.
4. The evidence — one chart per claim, not a dashboard.
5. The ask, stated explicitly. A deck that ends without an ask was a briefing.

On slides: headline states the takeaway, not the topic — "Churn concentrates in month two," not "Churn analysis." If the reader only reads headlines, they should get the argument.

Charts: one message each, labeled directly rather than through a legend, with the axis honest. Strip everything that is not carrying information.

Board decks and conference talks follow different rules

The structure above is shaped for persuasion to a room you are in. Two of the artifacts this skill is asked for are not that.

A board deck is read before the meeting, not presented at it. It goes out days ahead and is expected to be read, so it has to stand alone — which makes it the read-alone document, not the spoken-support deck.

• Separate what is for decision from what is for information, and say which is which on the page. A board meeting spent walking through updates is a board meeting with no decisions in it.
• Keep the format identical period over period. The value of a board pack is comparison across time, and a redesign destroys it. Same sections, same order, same metrics with the same definitions.
• Lead with what is not working. A pack that buries the problem on page nineteen costs credibility permanently once someone finds it, and they do.
• Bring the open question, not only the resolved one. A board shown finished thinking cannot help and eventually stops trying.

For how the meeting itself should be run and what belongs at which cadence, see operations:operating-cadence; for what has to be formally recorded, legal-risk:corporate-governance.

A conference talk is a performance with visual support, and it fails in the opposite direction from a board pack.

• Fewer words than feels safe. Slides are read faster than you speak, so text competes with you and wins. Images, one phrase, a single number.
• Design for the back of a large room and for the bottom third being invisible behind heads.
• The talk has to survive the projector — assume poor contrast and bad color reproduction, and never rely on a subtle tonal difference to carry meaning.
• Nothing on a slide should require the handout to be understood. If the deck will be shared afterward, that is a second artifact, not the same one.

One-pagers

A single surface has one job: get one idea across at a glance, and reward a closer read.

• Establish a focal point immediately — largest element, most contrast, positioned where the eye lands first.
• Hierarchy in three levels at most. More reads as noise.
• Everything aligns to a grid, including the things that look like exceptions.
• Design for where it will actually be read. A page printed and handed across a table, attached to an email, and projected in a room impose different minimum type sizes, and the one you designed on screen at full width is usually the least representative of the three.

Social graphics, carousels and infographics are a different job with different constraints — the feed decides how they are seen. marketing:visual-content covers them.

Never

• Read the slide aloud.
• Use a chart type because it is interesting rather than because it fits the comparison.
• Let a template's layout decide your argument's structure.