Rx: Infographics

by Jerry Weissman

In my constant effort as a coach to persuade business people to remember that a picture is worth a thousand words and to avoid the dreaded "Presentation-as-Document Syndrome," presenters often protest, "But I’m not an artist!"

Cast adrift from their familiar text slides, presenters are reluctant to try alternatives. However, you don't have to go out and buy a painter's smock and beret to break the mold of an endless parade of boring bullet slides.

Begin with overarching concept that the primary—and sole—purpose of your PowerPoint is to illustrate your narrative. Remember my often-repeated (because it still hasn't taken hold) recommendation that your business slideshow should follow the example of television news broadcasts: the anchorperson tells the story and the graphics serve as a headline that captures the essence of the story.

Then design your presentation headlines as "infographics" or "data visualizations." Visual.ly, the world’s largest community for sharing infographics, defines these terms as follows:

…Infographics are images created to explain a particular idea or dataset. They often contain beautiful graphics to increase their appeal and help catch your attention. Many of them use data visualization.

Data visualizations represent numerical data in a visual format. They can be anything from a simple bar chart to a complex three dimensional CAT Scan representation.

But go beyond the usual charts and venture into more vivid images to communicate and illustrate your story. You have at your disposal a number of resources to convert text into images, and to inspire your thinking visually:

• Google and Bing: Each of these powerful search engines has an "Images" feature. Just go to the search bar on either site, type in a keyword, and you'll see a broad array of photos, clip art, and line drawings. You can also search for synonyms of a key word. For instance, "jail," "prison," and "penitentiary" will bring up multiple variations of incarceration images. Moreover, as soon as you type in a key word, each site offers a pull down menu with other variations. "Jail" brings up "jail bars," "jail cell," and "jail house," and each of them brings up even more images—all in the interest of getting your creative juices flowing to think outside the plain vanilla text box.

Be aware, however, that many of the images on these sites may require payment for high resolution copies and/or royalties. Below is a list of ten websites where you can find free or low cost images.

• Royalty-free / Public Domain Image Websites:
  
  Freepik
  Google Images
  U.S. House of Representatives
  Open Clip Art Library (OCAL)
  Picdrome
  Public Domain Photos
  United States Senate
  Totally Free Images
  U.S. Government Photos and Images
  U.S. History Images

• Visual.ly: Visit the excellent graphic community site and see what they call their "data visualization enthusiasts" have created. Browse the site and sample the many impressive infographics their members have posted. They will inspire you to think visually. The site also provides a tool to step you through the creation of your own infographic.

• Microsoft PowerPoint: The industry standard presentation software itself offers multiple ways to turn plain vanilla words into interesting graphics. Just click the "Insert" tab on the top Ribbon and another tab opens with the following graphical choices: Table, Pictures, Clip Art, Photos, Shapes, Charts, and SmartArt. The latter provides an almost infinite array of shapes, colors, and textures to enhance the look and feel of your text. Look at the difference that embedding text in simple shapes and shading can make with the identical text in the figure below.
  
     

Now, with your palette of four different options—Google/Bing, Free Images, Visual.ly, and Microsoft PowerPoint—are you ready for your artist’s smock and beret?

"Get on with it!"

by Jerry Weissman

Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for president in 1964 infamously said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” This misguided view of political policy became a major factor in Mr. Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson, but it also serves as a warning lesson for presenters. Extremism in any pursuit can overshoot the mark and result in the opposite intent of the pursuit.

One of the most frequently repeated pieces of advice for presenters is to “Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, and then tell ’em what you’ve told ’em.” In fact, I offer the same advice in my own coaching practice and writing. The intent is to impose and maintain a clear narrative flow in presentations and speeches; and the reason it is repeated so often is that most presenters and speakers, who regularly crank out long, rambling, pointless patchwork pitches, desperately need reminding. The Triple “Tell ’em” is one solution. However, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing; a sword can cut two ways.

Bruce Eric Kaplan, a cartoonist who appears regularly in the New Yorker magazine as BEK, skewered the excessive Triple “Tell ’em” earlier this month with a panel that showed a presenter in front of an audience, saying, “First, I want to give you an overview of what I will tell you over and over again during the entire presentation.”

We’re also painfully familiar with presenters who impose a narrative laundry list on their bullets by saying “First, I’d like to talk about…” then move on to the second bullet saying, “Next, I’d like to talk about…” and then proceed through every bullet the same way until the end, when they say—wait for it— “Last but not least…”

Some presenters push their extreme handholding even further, by utilizing their slides to do the tracking. As in the figure above, they insert copies of an agenda slide between the sections of their presentation, progressively shifting the highlighted bullet to “Tell ’em what they’re gonna tell ’em” in the upcoming section. This technique can be useful in long tutorial presentations, but if there are only one or two slides between the variations of the agenda in short presentations—and short presentations are obligatory in this 140-character day and age—the audience, feeling patronized, will react with a big Duh!

Presenters are not the only perpetrators of such deliberate continuity devices. Geoff Dyer, who writes the “Reading Life” column the New York Times Book Review section, considers excessive tracking a “basically plodding method.”  In one of his columns, he criticized art historian Michael Fried, whose book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, takes “the style of perpetual announcement of what is about to happen to extremes.” Mr. Dyer said it is “like watching a rolling news program: Coming up on CNN . . . A look ahead to what’s coming up on CNN.”  Concluding his critique, Mr. Dyer wrote, “I kept wondering why an editor had not scribbled ‘get on with it!’ in huge red letters on every page of the manuscript.”

To keep your audience from thinking “Get on with it!” apply the Less is More rule, not just in your slide design but in your content. As you read in the prior posts, “Kill Your Darlings,” and “How Long Should a Presentation Last?”:

• Edit the amount of material you present

• Be brief AND concise

Then, with a shorter and more succinct story, look at your presentation from a 35,000 foot view—as a storyboard—in the Microsoft PowerPoint Slide Sorter view, or with the Power Presentations Storyboard form in the accompanying figure. It’s downloadable from our website: www.powerltd.com by clicking at the bottom of the home page.

Just as television and film directors use storyboarding to see the full scope of their stories, look at your slide show in this panoramic view to see your flow. Then rehearse your presentation aloud, moving from frame to frame. Do this several times. Along the way, you’ll find that you might want to add, delete, or shuffle slides. As you proceed with your iterations, you will develop verbal connective links for your narrative.

Ultimately, you will have a presentation in which The Triple “Tell ’em” is transparently implied. You will have a story that will be easy for you to deliver and, more important, easy for your audience to follow—without a laundry list, without CNN-style teasers, and best of all, without those patronizing agenda slides.

Get on with it!

This post appeared on hbr.org

 

Follow the Action

By Jerry Weissman

 

oes this large, illuminated letter look familiar? It should. The style has been around ever since medieval times to mark the beginning of a new document. It has continued on into modern publishing where an enlarged first letter marks the beginning of chapters in books and the beginnings of articles in magazines and newspapers. Now it becomes a factor in how we view computer screens.

EyeTrackShop, an eponymous Swedish start-up company, does exactly what its name says: track eye movements to, as their slogan puts it, “identify where people look, for how long and in what order.”  Using webcams to follow and record how viewers perceive images, the company’s technology helps advertisers create effective ads and web designers create effective web pages. By understanding the dynamics of how viewers perceive ads and web pages you can create effective graphics for your presentations.

One of EyeTrackShop’s projects studied how users viewed the homepages of Facebook and Google+. The results, shown in the “Fixation Order” charts below and reported in the Wall Street Journal, found that in both cases, “Users’ eyes head straight for the big status column in the middle of the screen, then over to the list of categories on the left side, then hop across to alerts on the right.”

 

Those movements are driven by forces more powerful than the images on the Google and Facebook sites, two forces that drive the eyes of every human being:

Nurture: In Western culture, because we have learned to read from left to right, our eyes always start reading at the upper left corner of documents

Nature: The optic reflexes in all human eyes impel them to take in new images, and so, having started at the upper left, readers’ eyes naturally—and involuntarily—move to the right. 

As a result, human eyes do essentially what the eyes of the subjects in the EyeTrackShop study did: after centering on the full image, they move to the upper left to start reading, and then sweep across to the right to continue reading. Therefore, whenever you click to a new slide, your audience’s eyes start reading at the upper left of the screen and sweep across to the right.

If your slide is densely packed with images, numbers, and/or text, your audience’s eyes will not see the entire image on the first rightward move; they will have to come back to the left and go back to the right again. The denser the slide, the more times your audience’s eyes will have to traverse the screen, the more traverses they make, the less they will hear of what you are saying.

Do you see where this is going? Back to the familiar Less is More principle, and this new added corollary: Reduce the number of moves your audience’s eyes must make to understand your slide.  

Apply this basic approach to the two most common slides in presentations today: text and bars.

• Avoid wordwrap in text

• Eliminate left axes in bar charts.  

You saw these principles applied in a prior blog, but they’re worth another look:

 

      

 

Feel how your eyes naturally take in each slide: they start at the left and swing to the right.

Do the same for all your presentations. Design effective slides by reducing the number of eye moves your audiences must make.

Minimize the processing their eyes—and their brains—must do. Let them spend their energy and time focused on you.

 

This post also appears on Indezine.com 

* Fixation Order Courtesy of EyeTrackShop, All Rights Reserved.

Better Box Thinking

by Jerry Weissman

The aphorism, “Don’t raise the bridge, lower the water,” has applications from the soaring heights of architectural design to the quotidian task of presentation graphics; the common denominator in both being the importance of thinking outside the box.

In a paper (links to a PDF) called "Thinking More Effectively about Deliberate Innovation," Christopher M. Barlow, PhD, a member of The Co-Creativity Institute, said that the familiar phrase "forced me to a new perspective: creativity is not a change in the problem, it is a change in us, a change in our thinking that makes the already possible solutions obvious."

Mr. Barlow identified the problem in the aphorism as how to "get the boats past the bridge," and then went on to say, "If I ask you to design a lift bridge, and you begin describing the building of a dam and lock to lower the water level, I have to wonder about your sanity or intelligence…When some of the alternatives [are] made obvious by the new viewpoint are better than the best of the old ideas, we call it creativity." He summarized the creative process as "Not out of the box thinking, better box thinking!"

An example of better box thinking in the usually boxy world of architecture comes from the recently opened International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong, a 108-story, 1,588-foot building that is now the fourth-tallest tower in the world.

Because tall buildings tend to sway in the wind, architects—like Paul Katz of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates who designed the ICC—seek innovative ways to mitigate the risk.

According to the Wall Street Journal story about the tower:

Most skyscrapers utilize pendulums or dampers, designed to transfer the motion of the building to mitigation devices. These can be enormous. Taipei 101, the world's second-tallest building, sports a massive 660-ton steel ball, suspended from the 92nd floor that swings in full view of visitors...Mr. Katz designed the entire ICC to provide wind buffers. Instead of meeting in corners, the sides join in recessed notches. Its scaled surface—which gives the building a dragon appearance beloved by Chinese—also breaks up wind force. "It's like the opposite of an aircraft's wing," Mr. Katz explains. "It breaks up lift."

For presenters—who usually think within the strict confines of outbound corporate marketing boxes—better box thinking involves consideration of the audience. In most of today’s unilateral and overloaded business presentations, thinking about the audience all too often goes missing in action.

A client of mine, let’s call him Jason, who is a marketing manager for a Silicon Valley telecommunications company, was assigned to develop his company’s slide show for a new product launch. One of the slides Jason created was a network diagram in which all the labels were crammed into small boxes (pun may or may not be intended), each box containing two- and three-line captions. Readers of Presenting to Win will recall that wordwrap makes it harder for the audience to read than one-liners. When I suggested that Jason trim the labels to one-liners, he asked, "Should I make the text smaller or the boxes larger?"

I replied, "Don’t raise the bridge, lower the water!"

Jason smiled in recognition that it was more important to make the slide easy for the audience to read than for him to create.

That’s better box thinking.

 

This post also appears on Indezine.

 

Another Precinct Heard From
by Jerry Weissman


Last month, a Swiss group calling themselves the Anti-PowerPoint Party launched their efforts—complete with a bright red octagonal STOP sign logo—and took their place in a long line of detractors that stretches back to 2003. The formal start of the criticism was the publication in Wired magazine of an article called “PowerPoint Is Evil: Power Corrupts, PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely” written by Edward R. Tufte, the noted graphics guru and professor emeritus of political science, computer science and statistics, and graphic design at Yale University.

Readers of this site will recall that I’ve often challenged Mr. Tufte’s opinions, most recently here, but the beating of PowerPoint goes on. My argument, simply and repeatedly stated, is to blame the penmanship, not the pen. A bad presentation is the fault of the user, not the tool.

To be flair, the Anti-PowerPoint Party does not fully advocate what its name implies. In fact, its goal, as stated on their home page is much more aligned with my argument:

We do not want to abolish PowerPoint*; we only want to abolish the PowerPoint*-CONSTRAINT.

We want that the number of boring PowerPoint* presentations on the planet to decrease and the average presentation to become more exciting and more interesting.

Nevertheless, the hue and cry of the Anti-PowerPoint Party was echoed by Lucy Kellaway, who writes the respected “Business Life” column for Financial Times. In her article on the launch, Ms. Kellaway advocated that “the APPP needs a terrorist faction, which would advocate cutting the wire in the middle of the table that connects the laptop to the projector…Better still would be to campaign for an outright ban.”

Even better still would be to campaign for a correction of user errors by banning the use of PowerPoint for anything but presentations (not send-aheads or leave-behinds) and to subordinate its use during presentations to support and illustration of the presenter’s narrative.

Joining this approach was a letter to the editors of Financial Times in response to Ms. Kellaway’s article. The letter was sent by Michael Baldwin, a presentation coach in New York who wrote:

In print cartoons, there is a dynamic relationship between the image and the caption that makes them—the good ones—both inseparable and unforgettable. With proper training, presenters can employ this same dynamic to produce memorable and convincing presentations.

Heed Mr. Baldwin’s metaphorical advice or your presentation will become a literal cartoon.

This post also appears on Indezine.

Musicians and Graphics
by Jerry Weissman

Believe it or not, a new documentary called Make Believe, about a group of teenagers who compete in a championship competition for magicians in Las Vegas, offers a lesson in how to display presentation graphics. The film focuses in on one of the most fundamental techniques used in magic: misdirection, or getting the audience to look in one direction while the magician performs a trick in the other direction. Magicians create misdirection in a variety of ways, but they are all based on the reflexive action of the audience’s eyes—to look at new visual information involuntarily.

Presenters often inadvertently misuse this reflexive action of their audiences’ eyes because of one of the most commonly-held false beliefs about presentations: that if presenters turn to look at their slides, they will appear to be unsure of their own content. However, if a presenter does not turn to look at a new slide, but continues to look at the audience, the audience will become conflicted. Their optic reflexes will force them look at the new image involuntarily. At the same time, the audience will also feel compelled to return the presenter’s gaze. Driven by these two opposing impulses, the audience’s eyes will rapidly shuttle back and forth between the screen and the presenter in confusion.

The difference between the false belief and neurological fact can be described as business school or B-School thinking versus C-School, for cinema, thinking. B-School teaches students to demonstrate assuredness; C-School teaches students to be cognizant of human sensory perception. Cinematographers and film editors understand the powerful subconscious physiological and psychological forces that impact audiences. These professionals play to these dynamics; they shoot and edit sequences to create positive or negative feelings to depict action as needed. In presentations, you want to create only positive feelings in your audiences.

Therefore, as a presenter, the instant a new slide appears, you must turn to look at the screen. As a matter of fact, turn to look at the screen with every click of every slide. Every time you turn to the screen, your movement will lead your audience turn to look where you are looking. Both you and your audience will arrive at the identical point in your presentation, in synchronization.

In the Wall Street Journal review of Make Believe, film critic Joe Morgenstern wrote “In magic, as distinct from filmmaking, misdirection is a good thing.” To which I add, in presentations, misdirection is a bad thing. Always turn to look at your screen.

(This post first appeared on the Harvard Business Review blog site.)

Positioned on Purpose?
By Jerry Weissman

We’re pleased to present blog five of five consecutive blogs about presentation design, and we are proud to announce that Indezine, a website dedicated to PowerPoint, is running this series concurrent with ours.

'No, not Jon Stewart’s right as in “correct;” and, given the liberal point of view of the host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, certainly not as in “right wing.” I’m referring to Jon Stewart’s right side where he shows the video clips of people and events he satirizes or mocks. Is this positioning arbitrary or intentional?

In previous blogs, you read that, because audiences in Western cultures read from left to right, you should design, animate, and display your presentation graphics so that—depending on the message you want to convey—your graphics follow or fight that predisposition. Movement to the right creates positive perceptions, movement to the left negative.

In Microsoft PowerPoint animation, the left and right movements occur in two general options: between slides (Slide Transition) and within a slide (Custom Animation). Although the direction of movement is the same in each option, each has a different nomenclature. Movement to the right in Slide Transition is called “Wipe Right;” movement to the right in Custom Animation is called “Wipe from Left.” Because your audiences’ eyes are accustomed to the left-to-right movement, make your default animation follow that same natural movement.

Movement to the left in Slide Transition is called “Wipe Left;” movement to the left in Custom Animation is called “Wipe from Right.” Use this counter-intuitive effect when you want to send a negative message such as the shortcomings of competing products, past problems your company has conquered, or market forces that pose major obstacles for your industry.

Moreover, whenever you present, be sure that the screen on which you display your slide show—whether a large projection screen or a small laptop—is located to your left as you face your audience. This positioning creates the familiar left-to- right movement for your audience. Every time you click to a new slide, their eyes will travel from you to your words and images in a smooth, fluid movement. If you present with the screen to your right, every new slide will cause your audience to make a resistant move to the left that would force them to read your words backwards.

Jon Stewart positions the images of the targets of his humor to his right, forcing his audiences to move to the left—with friction—to see the images. Friction in the movement produces a fractious perception.

Is this positioning arbitrary or intentional? Is Jon Stewart sending us a message?

To use the words of one of his favorite targets, “You betcha’!”

SPECIAL OFFER: Order Jerry Weissman's new book, Presentations in Action, between May 20 and June 10 to receive a free copy of the In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions DVD and 40% off another Weissman publication from FT Press.

Use Graphics to Create Continuity
by Jerry Weissman

We’re pleased to present the fourth of five consecutive blogs about presentation design, and to announce that Indezine, a website dedicated to PowerPoint, is running this series concurrent with ours.

Cinema and presentation graphics, although miles apart in complexity, share many common aspects. One is movie stunts. Matt Zoller Seitz, a freelance film critic, wrote an article about movie stunts on Salon that provides a valuable lesson in presentation design. Mr. Seitz noted that the latest cinema technologies, while creating imaginative and exciting action, have lost the important element of continuity. He wrote that the modern movie “seeks to excite viewers by keeping them perpetually unsettled with computer-enhanced images, fast cutting and a camera that never stands still.” As a result, he claimed, the film denies “the viewer a fixed vantage point on what’s happening to the characters.”

In contrast, Mr. Seitz cited a 100-year old silent film of a man jumping out of a burning hot air balloon into the Hudson River. Although the film itself is lost, the key shot lives on in a Topps bubble gum card. The point of Mr. Seitz’s historic reference is that the image is “a sustained wide shot that showed the diver in relation to the balloon and the Hudson River,” thus providing context for the action and for the viewer. If that scene were shot today, he added, “We'd more likely see a flurry of shots, only one of which showed us the big picture.”

The operative words above are “in relation to.” In today’s films, computer animation and fast cutting move the story along so quickly, audiences overlook or are unaware of the lack of context. In today’s pitches, presenters hurriedly cobble together a set of their company’s existing slides, giving their presentations s a one-after-another sequencing, in which no slide has any relationship to the preceding or following slides—and therefore no continuity for the presenter or the audience. At first, an audience might try to figure out what one slide has to do with another but, after a very short while, they give up and turn their attention to their smart phones.

One solution is for the presenter to make verbal links between slides; another is to create continuity in the slide design using a technique called Anticipation Space. In the slide below, you see two boxes side-by-side, one filled and one empty—the empty box creates a sense of anticipation.

When the empty box is filled with a set of parallel items, it sends the message that your company’s solution fulfills every requirement.

Anticipation Space creates relationships, continuity, and much more: it makes your presentation easy for your audience to follow. So easy, they might even look up from their smart phones.

Tomorrow's post will be Jon Stewart’s Right: Positioned on Purpose?

SPECIAL OFFER: Order Jerry Weissman's new book, Presentations in Action, between May 20 and June 10 to receive a free copy of the In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions DVD and 40% off another Weissman publication from FT Press.

Lives of Quiet Desperation
by Jerry Weissman

We’re pleased to present the third of five consecutive blogs about presentation design, and to announce that Indezine, a website dedicated to PowerPoint, is running this series concurrent with ours.

In 1845, the American author, philosopher, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau felt the need to get away from it all. He sequestered himself at an idyllic lake in the Berkshire Mountains for two years and wrote Walden; or Life in the Woods in which he famously observed, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Mr. Thoreau’s words are applicable to business people today who lead lives of not-so-quiet desperation every time they have to make a presentation. Of all the many reasons for their desperation—time pressure, workload, and the fear of failure—perhaps the most pressing is the self-imposed practice of using their PowerPoint slides as not only the presentation graphics, but also as speaker notes, send-aheads, and leave-behinds. This multitasking approach produces images of encyclopedic detail that serve none of the functions. This bane of presenters has become a boon for another constituency: professional designers and authors who offer solutions to help business people create simple, expressive, and purely illustrative graphical images. The best of the breed is Garr Reynold’s marvelous book, Presentation Zen, which offers readers design concepts based on the principles of Japanese minimalism.

These polar opposites of the graphics spectrum leave a large underserved area in the middle made up of presenters who want to break away from those encyclopedic slides but find Mr. Reynold’s Zen ideal is too far a reach for them. At one end of the spectrum, some presenters protest, “But I’m not a designer!” At the other end, others protest, “We don’t have the time to do that!”

For that large majority, here is a simple set of guidelines for the two most basic types of garden variety graphics used in presentations today: bullet slides and bar charts.

The guiding principles of this simple but effective bullet slide can be summarized in four bullets:

• Consider every line as a headline and not a sentence
• Avoid wordwrap by restricting every item to one line
• Start each line with the same grammatical part of speech: verbs, modifiers, etc.
• Distribute all the lines proportionally

The guiding principles of this simple but effective bar chart can be summarized in four bullets:

• Omit the y-axis and place the numbers directly on the bars
• Represent the legend in legible font size
• Use color-coded large labels
• Make it easy for your audience by minimizing their search

Or to paraphrase the last bullet in terms that Mr. Thoreau would appreciate, help your audience to lead lives free of desperation.

Tomorrow's post will be PowerPoint and Movie Stunts: Use Graphics to Create Continuity.

SPECIAL OFFER: Order Jerry Weissman's new book, Presentations in Action, between May 20 and June 10 to receive a free copy of the In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions DVD and 40% off another Weissman publication from FT Press.

Drive Your PowerPoint Home
by Jerry Weissman

We’re pleased to present the second of five consecutive blogs about presentation design, and to announce that Indezine, a website dedicated to PowerPoint, is running this series concurrent with ours.





American Apparel, Staples, Knoll Furniture, and Lufthansa Airlines all share a common denominator with the New York subway system: each of these diverse organizations uses the same popular typeface in its signage: Helvetica. A book called Helvetica and the New York City Subway System describes why their decision makers chose the font style:

For years, the signs in the New York City subway system were a bewildering hodge-podge of lettering styles, sizes, shapes, materials, colors, and messages. The original mosaics (dating from as early as 1904), displaying a variety of serif and sans serif letters and decorative elements, were supplemented by signs in terracotta and cut stone... Efforts to untangle this visual mess began in the mid-1960s, when the city transit authority hired the design firm Unimark International to create a clear and consistent sign system. We can see the results today in the white-on-black signs throughout the subway system, displaying station names, directions, and instructions in crisp Helvetica.

Helvetica is best suited for signage because it is a sans serif font which, with its clean, straight strokes, commands attention. In fact, sans serif is used for two of the most universally familiar signs: EXIT and STOP.

Serif font, with little hooks at the ends of the lines, is better suited for text documents because the hooks help a reader’s eyes to distinguish individual letters.

This distinction was validated in a book called Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaenev, a neuroscientist at the Collège de France in Paris. In a review of the book for the Wall Street Journal, Jonah Lehrer, the author of the newspaper’s “Head Case” column, explained why raising the bar of difficulty in visual information improves retention.

Unusual sentences with complex clauses and odd punctuation tend to require more conscious effort, which leads to more activation in the dorsal pathway. All the extra cognitive work wakes us up; we read more slowly, but we notice more. Psychologists call this the "levels-of-processing" effect, since sentences that require extra levels of analysis are more likely to get remembered.

The point here for presenters is to draw an indelible boundary between documents that are meant to be read and graphics that are meant to illustrate. If you are creating a document, by all means use the “unusual sentences with complex clauses and odd punctuation” that Mr. Lehrer described. And use serif font.

But if you are creating presentation graphics, treat the text in your slides as signage or headlines. Look at any newspaper or magazine and you’ll see that headlines are composed mainly of key words such as nouns, verbs, and modifiers, with very few articles, conjunctions, and prepositions; the latter are only needed for complete sentences in reading text.

Unlike readers of text, your presentation audiences cannot process your ideas if you assault their eyes with dense information on your slides. And unlike readers, your presentation audiences must process not only what you are showing but simultaneously what you are saying. Their eyes, ears and, ultimately, their brains go into sensory overload. Instead, compose the text in your slides as headlines and do so in sans serif font—then provide the body text in your narrative.

You are the presentation; your slides are the signage.

Tomorrow's post will be The Graphics Spectrum: Lives of Quiet Desperation

SPECIAL OFFER: Order Jerry Weissman's new book, Presentations in Action, between May 20 and June 10 to receive a free copy of the In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions DVD and 40% off another Weissman publication from FT Press.