Hewitt House, Winstanley Road, Orrell, Wigan WN5 7XA, United Kingdom

Tel: +44 1942 324977 e mail: wigan@diamondenv.co.uk web: www.diamondenv.co.uk

Presentation Design Workshop

Mike Slater, Diamond Environmental Ltd.

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Introduction

Occupational hygienists have to deliver presentations for a number of different situations including:

Presenting results, conclusions and recommendations from surveys to management and

workers

Talks on occupational hygiene to various types of audience

“Toolbox talks”

Delivering talks at BOHS meetings

Presenting papers at conferences

Conference Keynote lectures

Educational talks and lectures

The format of the presentation should be adapted to the type of situation. What’s appropriate for a

meeting where results are presented to management or Safety Representatives is unlikely to be the

same as if you were presenting the same results as a paper at a conference of your peers

Pay attention to presentations – how they are designed and delivered is important if you want to

make a good impression. It’s worth putting some effort into presentation design.

Total presentation experience

Your presence

and delivery

What you say

Your slides

Your handout

Audience interaction

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Common problems with presentations

Unclear objective

Too much content for time available

Text heavy slides

o Too many words that distract from what the speaker is saying

o Unappealing and uninteresting to look at

o Lack of visuals

Use of poor quality, clichéd clip art

Badly designed charts and graphics

Lack of audience interaction and engagement

Reading directly from slides

Poor verbal delivery

Preparing and designing a presentation

Never prepare and deliver a presentation that you wouldn’t want to sit through yourself!

Features of good presentations include:

Clear objective

Well structured

An appropriate amount of content for time available

Content pitched at the right level for the audience)

Good materials - including well designed slides and handouts

Clear, interesting delivery

Rehearsed

Allocate adequate time for preparing the presentation.

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When planning your presentation, make sure you know about:

your audience

your material

yourself – i.e. your strengths and weaknesses

your objective

It’s important to have a clear objective – what you want to achieve. Identify the key points, but

don’t try to be too ambitious there is only so much that your audience can absorb and retain in the

time you have available.

Prepare handouts that they can take away with them or materials that they can access later (e.g. by

e-mail or by downloading from the Internet).

The key steps in preparing to deliver a presentation are as follows:

1. Define your objective – what you can realistically achieve in the time available. When doing

this take into account

a. The audience – makeup, prior knowledge, what they want or need from you

b. The time available

2. Design your content – prepare an outline . It’s usually best to avoid using Powerpoint (or

other presentation software) to do this. Use a pen and paper to sketch out your ideas and

then tidy them up and rearrange them if necessary.

3. Design your materials – prepare good quality slides and handouts. Think about their content

and how they should look before you start typing

4. Practice and rehearse and then deliver

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Designing materials

The materials you use for the presentation are important. Good visual aids, such as slides, should

enhance what you are saying. Well designed handouts for your audience to take away can reinforce

what you have said and help you to achieve your objectives.

It isn’t always necessary to use slides. Think about whether an alternative approach would be more

appropriate.

Slides, if used, should support what you have to say – they are NOT the presentation. Good slides

are usually meaningless on their own without the presenter.

Good slides don’t make good handouts. Slides designed for use as handouts are too wordy and don’t

make good visual aids. They distract from what the presenter is saying.

Think carefully about the design of your materials and devote adequate time to their preparation.

Too often sides are NOT designed with the audience in mind. They are often used as

An outline of the presentation rather than visual aids

A script or teleprompter for the presenter

Both of these are poor practice that should be avoided.

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Slide design

Slides are visual aids – they are NOT the presentation, but should support what YOU have to

SAY

Good slides DO NOT make good handouts

Avoid using standard Powerpoint templates if you can. They drive you into creating text

heavy slides with lists of bullet points

Slides should be like headlines containing the key point, not the whole story

Make your slides as visual as possible – use images and diagrams to support your point

rather than words

Use high quality graphics – avoid clichéd clip art and low resolution photos

Minimise the word count on your slides – keep them short and snappy and to the point.

Avoid the dreaded “slideument”

Try to aim for one idea per slide.

If you really need to present lists try to use alternative approaches to bulleted lists to make

them more visually appealing and interesting

Remember, with presentation software, slides are free so you can have as many as you need or

want. If you find you have too many for the time you have available that probably suggests that you

are trying to cover too much.

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Handouts

It’s useful to provide handouts

They allow you to cut down on the amount of material you cover in your presentation

and so not commit information overload

Audience members will have a concrete reminder making your presentation more

memorable.

It’s become standard practice for presenters to distribute copies of their slides as handouts.

However, well designed slides don’t make good handouts. If your slides are bullet-point slides (not

recommended) then they will often be cut-down sentences which will no longer make sense to the

reader a week later. And if they are visual slides (recommended) then they’re also unlikely to make

sense without additional text. For handouts try to prepare a written document which highlights and

expands on your content.

If you do want to provide copies of Powerpoint slides, one of the easiest ways of creating a handout

is to type the text of the handout in the “Notes” pane of the PowerPoint edit screen. Then print your

slides as “Notes”. You’ll have an effective handout.

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Further Reading

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery – Garr Reynolds

slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations - Nancy Duarte

The Non-Designer's Presentation Book – Robin Williams

Useful Websites

Presentation Zen http://www.presentationzen.com/

Duarte http://www.duarte.com/training/tools/

Contact Details

mike@diamondenv.co.uk

http://www.slideshare.net/mikeslater

http://diamondenv.wordpress.com

Twitter @diamondenv