Combining Storytelling and Design for Unforgettable Presentations
Sometimes you work on projects that you have to share with the world (or your company). These projects make an impact, and by sharing them you can get more support or show the value you bring. It can be a challenge to tell the story in a good way. In this post, you'll get some guidelines that can help you to create beautiful slide decks. In the end, you can apply the tips to your own project.
Note: These tips are applicable to many different types of presentations. And not only to presentations, you can also use them to create a shareable document that tells the story of a project. If you create the slides in the right way, you can share them directly with other people.
The Two Main Principles of a Storytelling Slide Deck
You can find many tips regarding Storytelling on the internet. Some of them are important, e.g. you shouldn't use jargon to make it understandable for everyone, and of course you should create appealing visualizations that support the story. Such things make sense and I hope this is not a problem for most professionals.
In my career I sometimes struggled with ‘telling the story'. Multiple times during my presentations I saw people drop or lose interest. Early in my career, I had a one-size-fits-all mentality, and told the same story to technical and business people. As you can imagine, that didn't work. Now, I adjust my slide decks to the audience. If I am invited to a large meeting to share project results, I ask the goal of the meeting and the audience to adjust accordingly.
Lately, I received a different kind of question. My manager asked to create a slide deck about my project to share broadly in the company. That was new, and it introduced new difficulties, such as: "How can I explain my project understandable to everyone without being there and presenting it?" and "What should I include and exclude in the story, while making it coherent and tell everything that's important?" I started in the wrong way: My first slide was full of text to serve as a summary of the project and results. Luckily, my manager explained two principles that helped a lot in improving the slide deck. These two principles changed the way I look at slide decks, storytelling and presentations.
I hope you can use them as well, to be able to share your projects with the world in a good way!
Principle 1. Horizontal Alignment
The first principle is horizontal alignment. Each slide within a presentation should function as a coherent unit, showing one single aspect of the overall narrative. You shouldn't just label the slide, but instead make a statement by putting the core message in the title. Instead of generic headings like "Benefits", "Improvements", **** or "Summary", the title should state the key takeaway or insight you want to tell at that particular slide.
Then, the visualizations (charts, graphs, images, diagrams, text boxes, etc.) on the slide should directly support or explain the message from the title. By doing this, you pair the content of the slide with the title. Every slide will be self-contained and deliver one distinct part of the larger story.
The title of a slide should state the key takeaway or insight you want to tell at that particular slide, and the visualizations should support that message.
This approach has many benefits. The biggest one is that it makes sure the communication is clear, because each slide focuses on one main idea. This makes it easier for the audience to grasp and remember the information.
For creating the charts on a slide, I can recommend the book Storytelling with Data. Besides the book, they have many resources online, like the chart guide and makeover examples. Some practical tips they give:
- Remove clutter. Every element you add to a slide, will add cognitive load to the audience. By removing elements and choosing colors selective (e.g. only for highlighting relevant information) you can help the audience a lot.
- Choose an effective chart. It can be simple text, a slope graph, line graph, bar chart, histogram, table, heat map or scatterplot. Make sure the chart supports the message and is easy to understand.
Principle 2. Vertical Alignment
The second principle, vertical alignment, takes a macro view of the presentation structure. It means that if you read all the titles of the slides in sequence, these titles should tell the full story of the presentation. This makes a coherent and comprehensive narrative.
This strategy requires careful planning and organization: Each slide title should serve its individual purpose, but also contribute to the overarching message. It should be a logical progression from introducing the subject, through development of key points or arguments, and then conclude with a strong, memorable closing statement.
When reading all the titles of the slides in sequence, these titles should tell the full story of the presentation.
You can see vertical alignment as offering a backbone to your presentation, as it ensures that the content flows in a logical manner. This helps the audience to follow along more easily, you connect the dots between individual slides to form an understanding of the subject. By doing this correctly, your presentation will be more impactful and memorable.
That's it! Sounds easy, right? To be honest, it takes time to create a well thought and good story. Revisiting, asking feedback, and iterating to improve the slide deck is very normal and in my opinion preferred. Let's apply the principles to an example.
Example: Optimizing cargo and baggage handling operations
The example we will take a look at is about the (fictional) airplane company BlueHorizon Flights. They launched a project that optimizes baggage handling operations. The results were quite good and after the proof of concept, it's time for a go/no go. The goal of the presentation is to convince stakeholders to continue with the project.
Instead of doing the following:
- Creating slides with names like: Introduction, Technical Details and Results in Numbers
- Add lots of text to the slides (and by doing that making it hard to follow for the audience).
- Adding many graphs to the result slide, jumping from result to result.
- Provide technical details for a non-technical audience.
We will:
- Give every slide a title with the key point of the slide.
- Make sure all the titles in sequence tell the story of the presentation (vertical alignment).
- Make sure the visualizations on a single slide support the title (horizontal alignment).
Vertical Alignment: Fixing the Titles
Let's start with a ‘bad' example, so we can fix the issues. It's quite common to create titles of slides like this:
And of course it's not always bad, there might people who can give a great presentation using a structure like this. But I believe a presentation will be better and easier to understand for the audience by applying the horizontal and vertical alignment tips. Let's create the titles of the new slide deck. They might look like this:
Just like that, we now have vertical alignment in place! Do you already got ideas for visualizations on the slides? Sometimes it can be hard to make the titles not too long. You can try to move some less important parts of the title to text boxes, or rephrase the text. Some title examples can also be written with less words (e.g. is it really necessary to say AI-driven Dynamic Resource Allocation Software?). You can also come to the conclusion that two titles work better combined on one slide. As I said, it's an iterative process, and during slide creation, you can adapt and change if something else works better. Just make sure the titles work well together and tell the story.
Horizontal Alignment: Support the Title with Visualizations
Besides the titles, we will dive into one slide to ‘fix'. This gives you an idea on how to approach horizontal alignment.
Here is an ugly problem introduction slide:
I hope you don't like it. Okay, what is wrong here? The title of course, and the long sentences. Also, the charts are ugly and hard to read: a dual-axis chart and pie charts are (almost) never a good idea (yes, even 2D pie charts are often a bad choice). Can you tell me whether the orange slice of the pie or the dark blue one is the biggest? Another issue is that the pie chart doesn't support the message directly. It's interesting to know the causes of the mishandled luggage, but it doesn't relate directly to the text.
How can we fix these issues? Actually, there are many ways! Keep in mind that the following slide is just an example to give you an idea on how to apply the horizontal alignment principles:
This slide has a clear title that directly gets to the point: the problem with the luggage handling. The three charts support this message and they are very easy to understand. The first one shows that BlueHorizon has the highest costs compared to similar airlines. The BlueHorizon bar is marked, to directly point your eyes towards that part of the graph. The second chart is an improved version of the dual-axis chart from the previous slide. By giving them the shared x-axis but separate y-axis the chart is easier to read. Clutter is removed, like the grid lines and colors. The text below the charts explains them. These three main points are interesting to stakeholders: high costs, increasing rate in mishandled luggage, and an increase in complaints from customers and coworkers.
One final note: when you are presenting, it's often useful to add animations. This means that instead of showing the full slide directly, it can help to add parts to the slide one by one (in the previous example, chart by chart). This makes it harder for people to get distracted by everything on the slide. Also, sharing a deck without presenting might need a bit more text than when you are there and can tell everything.
For the 1% of people who is curious about the answer to the pie chart question; the dark blue slice is the biggest one.
Conclusion
Combining horizontal and vertical alignment principles can help a lot in creating effective and engaging presentations. Each slide on its own contributes to the story on a micro level (horizontal alignment), while all slides together tell the full story (macro level, vertical alignment). This enhances the clarity, impact and persuasiveness of your presentations.
Good luck with crafting your slide decks and give even better presentations!
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