Presentations Should Feature Clear Pictures and Graphics

The purpose of a presentation is NOT to impress the audience with how much you know.

The purpose of a presentation is to convey your message to the entire audience in the most effective and efficient manner possible.  Depending on the venue, your audience may feature people from different disciplines, backgrounds, and interest levels in what you have to say.  You are trying to influence their thoughts, opinions, and behavior to your point of view, right?  Otherwise everybody in the room is wasting their time at this meeting!  They should leave and get back to work if there is nothing to discuss!

You can only influence the audience if they can connect with your message.  And this is best done with pictures.

I am not talking about meaningless clip art and distracting decoration, animation, and fluff on your PowerPoint template.  I’m talking about showing graphs instead of data tables, flow diagrams instead of a list of bullet points, and so on.

And everything must be legible from the back of the room, to a person with 20/40 eyesight.  Because guess what — if your boss is 50-ish or older, chances are they don’t see as well as they used to.  Don’t aggravate them by putting up things they can’t read!

Goodman Ager Says: Nobody wants to hear you say “oh, well, this looked different on my screen” when you are presenting!  Preview your presentation in the room you will be using for the presentation.  Stand in the back of the room, with the lights on, and see if you can read and understand everything.  Make all text bold, and as big as possible.  Many projectors wash out or alter your carefully-chosen colors, so make adjustments.  Having a smooth presentation will make you look more polished and help you advance your career more quickly.

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