Effective visual design is much more than pretty slides.

A pretty slide that doesn’t convey the meaning of your content and support you while you’re speaking is just as useless as a bullet point laden one. You can’t afford visuals that put a wall between you and your audience.

Slidework combines scientific design principles with expert content development to deliver presentations that knock down walls and open doors.

We become your “audience advocate,” working closely with you to bring clarity, focus and an effective flow to your presentation. This content development leads to the creation of visual designs that support your spoken words rather than compete with them. Your presentation will be accepted, understood and remembered.

Here are several before and after examples that highlight problems often found in typical PowerPoint slides and how Slidework might address them. View the slides in full screen and see the animation used in the first after example.

Example 1

This is a common example of a product promotion slide. A slide like this begs the speaker to read it. Unfortunately the audience will read it more quickly than the speaker and then tune out. This slide is loaded with jargon that says a lot about the product but does not clearly show why the audience should care.

Our solution allows the speaker to walk through an animated example of hackers attacking a network. The speaker can fill in product details and the key messages of why the audience should care and what’s in it for them are clear. Click here to see the animation (image quality was reduced to shorten download time).

Example 2

Here is the financial slide we all see at annual meetings. The chart is hard to read and requires some effort from the audience to connect the dots. The text on the slide doesn’t guide you to what’s most important; it simply serves as the speaker’s notes. This slide is not for the audience it is simply what the speaker wants to say.

A slide designed for the audience cuts through the financial footnotes and makes what is most important immediately accessible.

Example 3

Here is another example of key information being obscured by too much text on the slide. This also shows why clipart is not usually a good idea. In this case, the cute factory picture completely draws your eye away from the real content. There is not a lot of good news, but it isn't going to make an impact.

The message delivered in this way is much more likely to get the speaker that big promotion.

Example 4

What better example of a slide gone wrong than the classic, “let me apologize now because I know you won’t be able to read this”, slide. There is nothing like this slide to send clients and audiences into an instant bullet point coma.

The investors in this medical research are much more likely to be encouraged to participate in the next financing round with a clear, visual representation of the clinical trial data.

For more information about planning and executing successful presentations we recommend Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, Updated and Expanded Edition by Jerry Weissman.