Stop Bad Powerpoint

Not sure who was the first to proclaim…Power corrupts, Powerpoint corrupts absolutely (Edward Tufte?)……but it’s definitely a truism. Sitting through the Bill Gates platform presentation above would be torture.

Fret not….as Harvard cognitive scientist Stephen Kosslyn offers sound and simple advice to those responsible for mind-numbing, info-clogged, bullet-point-ridden slide shows. At a recent conference, he explained how breakthroughs in cognitive science have revealed better methods for presenting information via PowerPoint.

i09 has a good summary of his talk…which conveniently breaks it down to 4 guiding rules:

The Goldilocks Rule – never include more information than your audience needs in a visual image.
The Rudolph Rule – guide your audience to important details.
The Rule of Four – never present your audience with more than four things at once.
The Birds of a Feather Rule – to indicate that things belong in a group, make them similar by giving them the same color or shape.

Happy presenting.