Everyone has suffered through a horrible presentation. There’s a reason that people talk about “death by PowerPoint,” and it almost always relates to the professional design of the slides (or lack thereof).

Use the strategies below to make sure your ePoster Presentation is polished, professional, and easy to read. 

Apply These Strategies to Your Project

• Use standard margins on all sides of your slides. Never run the text into the edges of the slides.
• Choose a font size that is large enough to read without magnification. At a minimum, use the following guidelines:
  • 24 point font size for conference room presentations.
  • 14 point font size for desktop presentations.
• Avoid fonts in all caps, since they decrease readability. See the LinkedIn Learning video “Avoid All Caps and Underlined Text” for more information. The video is free with your VT login. Follow these instructions to login.
• Arrange your text so that uses flush left, ragged right alignment. See Centered Text Is Harder to Read and the F-Shaped Reading Pattern.
• Apply the design principles of Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity (CRAP) to improve your document design. See Put CRAP in Your Document Design.
• Structure your document so the information is well-organized and easy to navigate. See Chunking Your Paragraphs into Readable Bites and Information-Rich Signposts Help Readers.
• Add strong headings and subheadings on your slides. See Using Strong Phrasing in Your Headings and the section on “Titles and Headings” in Chapter 11 of Markel and Selber’s Technical Communication (page 269–271).
• Use well-integrated, well-designed visuals to clarify the information in your presentation. Most slides should include such graphics. See the tips on page 592 of Markel and Selber’s Technical Communication.

 

 

 

 

Photo credit: 136/366 - Death by Powerpoint by Paul Hudson on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.