Establishing “rules” of Visual Storytelling to avoid Death by PowerPoint

169_Visual Storytelling Rules + Death by PPT

Molly: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Presentation Thinking, AKA, the Storyteller Study Club, AKA, the podcast where we talk about PowerPoint. If you're just tuning in for the first time, my name is Molly Gagan and I am the content marketing manager and product marketing manager at Ghost Ranch Communications, a little place where presentation designers live.

We are a boutique agency where we bring people's keynotes, white papers, anything pable to life. We are passionate about pitch decks and presentations that tell good stories and. If this is your, yeah, if this is your first time tuning in, we [00:01:00] offer a wide variety of advice on storytelling, delivery, presenting, and like today, sometimes the actual act of designing PowerPoints and slides themselves.

So for the past couple of months, or Q2, I suppose we are focusing on a pillar we refer to as visual storytelling. I know we've been defining visual storytelling in the last few episodes. You can revisit our episode with Ghost Ranch, creative Director Allie Wilson, and most recently, Mikey, my co-host, who's off on a Disney cruise right now, talked about Aristotle's Poetics.

And Aristotle's Poetics includes all of the elements of what makes a good story, great from the plot to character arcs to the song and spectacle of a story at the time, of course, when Aristotle wrote that, that was about. You know, this literal song and score that was associated with plays the spectacle, like the costume [00:02:00] and the aesthetics of, of a story as well.

It's compared a lot in the film world to what you see on screen now and of course the soundtrack. So for presentations, we, Mikey and I have been, you know, down this storytelling rabbit hole. We've really been trying to bring all of these story study stuss, story story experts. Into the presentation thinking realm.

So what does that look like for giving good presentations and communicating with peers, both in professional and personal world? We think presenting is everywhere and storytelling is everywhere. So to continue down this focus of visual storytelling for this quarter, I am going to be updating a little something, a little phrase that we've heard time and time again, essentially since the inception of PowerPoint itself.

Called death by PowerPoint. So if you are someone that has to create slides and is in need of a little bit of an update and some inspiration for how to elevate your slides, elevate your story, and you don't come [00:03:00] from a graphic design background, I am going to be sharing sourced from the designers themselves for at Ghost Ranch, some really tactical and simple tips on visual storytelling.

We've defined it. We've been talking about. The science behind it and why it works in our brains. And now we're gonna be talking about a little bit about the how so, how to avoid death by PowerPoint and the rules of visual storytelling. Let's get into it. Alright. First up, something we harp at GoRat all the time, and when I send a text into the designer chat on Slack and said, you guys we're looking to update death by PowerPoint, what are today's rules for visual storytelling?

I got this multiple, multiple times from different designers, but essentially you always want to start with one idea per slide. We've said it in the podcast before and I'm saying it again. If you have more than one main idea for your slide, it inevitably like you only get a certain amount of space. You know this, this 16 [00:04:00] by nine ratio, and it's hard to put stuff in there and distill it down so.

Decide on one idea per slide, something I'm going to link in the spice cabinet. Our show notes is this amazing blog post from present, P-R-E-Z-E-N-T, and they go through different types of slides that are helpful to determine what you're saying per slide. And what I mean by that is sometimes, you know when you see a deck.

There might be like a timeline. You see, there might be a comparison chart. There could be the sales funnel illustration. There could be a case study or a testimony, a quote that you're sharing from someone. Sometimes it's just like a divider slide and like a nice big quote, uh, for inspiration. So. Decide on those type.

If you can help decide on, like, I don't really know what I'm gonna say here, but I know I have to share this case study. I don't really know what I'm gonna say here, but I have to share this data that can help you deter these categories of slides can help determine that one idea per slide [00:05:00] that you need to rock with.

So start there. And that'll really, even if you just wrote on, you pull out your Google slides, you pull out your PowerPoint and you just write. Funnel, you know, workflow, uh, architecture, you have start like mapping those out in a really simple way in on your slides. It'll help you fill it in later and you can always move them around.

But one idea per slide. Boom, let's go. Technical director, Steve Sheets, had a great input with this particular idea. He says, ask yourself, what's the shape of this idea, which I think is a really beautiful way to ask yourself, how the hell should I. Put this information in, which brings me to my next point, which is think about your hierarchy of information.

And what I mean by that is what is most important to convey, and you need to have that be the biggest and most important piece on the slide. How do you lay it out? Something that's immediately so familiar to us in PowerPoint and G slides and these types of setups is you write like a header and then a bunch of bullets below it.[00:06:00]

Now when we think about what Steve was asking though, what's the shape of this idea? That's not a super compelling shape just to have a title and supporting points. While simple and kind of tried and true, it does get stale. So even leaning into having your title on the left hand side of the slide in the middle, or having it on the right hand side of the slider, even in the middle, just sitting on its own.

That can be, that can shake up the style of PowerPoints and presentations enough to really get people's attention. Steve emphasizes in this day and age, we really need to lean into different layouts, so those types of layouts with a header on the left and a supporting visual on the right instead of just a long list of bullets.

Using that as a repeated style can help people recognize what's coming and discern when a new section begins or something different begins, because that that layout can be broken too. So really breaking up that top title. With the supporting bullets versus the side and image should, supporting visual can be so helpful.

So think [00:07:00] about your hierarchy of information. Another piece of advice within this piece, within this element, to avoid this, this piece of advice to avoid death by PowerPoint, is to chunk it out. Steve says, use grids. Attach. Yeah, you could. There's different ways you can view in PowerPoint and you can attach a, a little grid on your, on your slide that only you can see as you're designing it.

To put places put to put items, elements on your slide that have enough space to breathe so that there isn't too much information on the single slide. So you can chunk it out and be like, I wanna say this, and then this is this important point. So chunk it out. You could even like draw a big circle on it if you were mapping them out with your hand, like by hand.

Sometimes it's easy to, you know, write stuff down on sticky notes and then post it to the wall and see, see where it goes. Maybe you have an expo board you like to work with. But truly chunk it out before you actually plug in the, the content itself, you know, so what we've covered so far in this [00:08:00] death by PowerPoint update episode is think about the type of a slide one idea per slide, and think about the hierarchy of information, where you want to put the stuff itself, location.

And then thirdly, something that came up. Multiple times when I, when I threw this into the chat and certainly was supported by a best practices deck that we worked on for, uh, for a particular brand. And developing your own decks is thinking about the content itself that goes in there. And when you think about that, you always wanna make sure it's supporting.

The one idea per slide ask yourself is anything you're adding in that category, not supporting the one main idea. And you can take that out So. Think about the content, and there shouldn't be more than six items on the slide. In the OG Ted Talk from 2014, which is over, you know, about 10 years old at this point, from David JP Phillips.

He's a Swedish communication expert. Whose name kinda went viral with his TED Talk, how to Avoid Death by PowerPoint. [00:09:00] Certainly that phrase already existed in the business realm by 2014, but he gave it some, some real illustration and visual communication really in this TED Talk. And in it he walks us through like five, easy to employ design fixes backed by clear psychological science.

That really can transform any deck you're working on. So even though they're super simple concepts, like I'm talking about here, they're accessible even to folks without a graphic design background. I think one of the main reasons that Death by PowerPoint became a thing is that, you know, like with any free platform that's offered to the world.

With no training and no background in the, in the arts or styles of, you know, graphic communication, visual storytelling. It's hard. It's really hard to do and hard to learn. So imagine just like a bunch of people getting to open Photoshop or Final Cut for the first time and not knowing what to do with it.

Like, of course we've made bad PowerPoints. It's okay. You know, we just have to like accept that and understand what, what's [00:10:00] wrong with them so that we can understand how to do them better. In this talk, the reason I'm giving you so much background here is he has a very, very effective study where he shows that more than six items on a slide.

And what I mean by items is a bullet point, an image or those supporting points to support the big main idea One, one idea per slide. It's too much. People can't skim it. Their brain can't take on more than six, and even six is a good bit. Like you can't have six run-on sentences. I'm talking like six words, six like tiny phrases that are supporting this title that you, that you're, you're clinging to.

You know, you need to, you need to figure out how to, how to distill that down so that no more than six elements exist and it's just not possible for people's brains to. To take in. And that I would say is something that, you know from this TED Talk in 2014 to right now, time of recording is April, 2025 has not changed.

[00:11:00] So no more than six items per slide. I would argue that even now in 2025, people's attention span has gone even. Light further down. And I would say even less is better. The less the better. Um, you can, people are only gonna walk away with the, if they're able to repeat some things that you say, they're not gonna be able to repeat all six.

So just focus on the two or three most important ones. That's the addendum I would add for 2025 at this point. And with that, of course, as I said earlier, you need to leave room on the slides for the content to breathe, so it can't just be all next to each other. Real stacked all tight. Steve has some really great points in his presentation design for the non-designer workshop about paragraph spacing versus line spacing.

Paragraph spacing is that space. When you do a hard return, it gives you that nice break and a line point. Sometimes you don't even need to have bullets if you have some nice paragraph spacing throughout. Line. Spacing of course, is just the line in bet the space in between lines as you read a sentence or a paragraph [00:12:00] that's connected to each other.

And that needs to be big enough for people in the back of a room that you can need to think about like the stage and the style that you'll be presenting this in the context so that people can read it and understand it from the back of the room. If your line facing, if you're fitting in too much text that your line facing is tight, tight, tight, they will not be able to read that.

It will blend in from the back of the room. And that's important to think to consider as well. So type of slide and one idea per slide hierarchy of information and where you put that information, the content itself, and not stuffing more than six items on the slide, more or less if possible. And the last thing I wanna call out from the desk of the design, rancheros, is about style.

And when Mikey and I covered the Aristotle episode, just in uh, episode 1 68, uh, poetics. Aristotle includes style in a, in his own words, which is talking about the song and the [00:13:00] spectacle. I briefly mentioned it at the opening of this episode, but it's important to consider when you are adding visual elements to a presentation, a Google slide, a even just like a one-off little white paper PR announcement or something.

You can't just be picking. It's stuff for the sake of stuff. You know, there's a million things we can do now with Gen AI and throwing in all these like crazy gifts. People love gifts of course, and memes, but gifts for the sake of gifts that aren't adding anything to your story aren't worth it. It's actually gonna be taking away, even if it gets you a little chuckle, if it's not furthering your visual story, it is not worth adding into that category.

So again, Steve really emphasizes in this, Steve, our technical director, is there anything you're adding in this category that is not supporting the one main idea per slide? And if so, that thing needs to be cut. [00:14:00] When we think about style, one of the first things that comes to mind is color. You can pick any color in the world.

Lots of people love to pick a bunch of different colors, but it's important to lean into best practices. You just need to lean into the one or two brand colors so that you have a consistent visual story and you can lean on a third contrasting accent color for really when you want things to pop. And that's important.

It's, it's fun. Like even if it's not in your brand, your brand story, having that accent color to create contrast, draw attention. And shake up The consistency when it makes sense is so helpful. So rather than picking a bunch of different colors, working your way through the rainbow, lean into your brand colors and then pick one third contrasting piece to draw attention to the things you want to.

When we think about visual storytelling, of course there's images, visuals, what are you using? Stock images, illustrations, custom illustrations. Either way, you can get, like I know you can buy a bunch of different illustrations on [00:15:00] Design Pickle. Now you can get stock from anywhere. There's so many different styles of stock, but pick a style and be consistent.

If you're going stock, stick with it. If you're going illustrations, stick with it. Stick with the same style. If you're doing supporting memes or gifts throughout your deck. Pick some and be consistent. And again, make sure they further the story. They don't just distract the stop photos. There's so many different styles now that it's also good to make sure they look good together.

So think about the cool versus warm tones, the brightness and the contrast. All of those things don't, can be adjusted in PowerPoint, in Google Slides. You don't actually have to have PowerPoint or all this like design knowledge to change that. You can simply apply a filter to do so. In fact, we do have a couple of quick tip tutorials on our YouTube on how to do that when you bring in iconography.

People love icons these days. Of course. Nice and simple icons that can help add to your story. But again, if you've got iconography, a stock, a meme, everything on your [00:16:00] on your slide, what can you take out? What can you, you know, we don't need to have multiple, multiple visuals per slide. So what can you take out and use the iconography consistently to bring your story along, call out the clear milestones, call out the features you're talking about.

Without detracting from it. And the icons can be a helpful way, a visual reminder for the audience to remember those points later on. So don't overload them. Keep them kind of precious icons in your pocket so that you don't overdo it. You don't need to just have a thumbs up icon just for the sake of having a thumbs up icon.

I see. See, I see the thumbs up so often in pitch text. It's interesting. So just making sure we aren't overusing our iconography. So again, within that style element of how to avoid death by PowerPoint and how to implement the rules of visual storytelling, we wanna stick to just a few colors, brand colors, and bring in a third xly when you want things to pop.

You wanna stick to [00:17:00] consistent stock versus illustrations. Make sure they're the similar cool and warm tones and brightness and style, and you wanna be consistent and precious with your iconography. So always with all of these items, continually ask yourself, is there anything you're adding that is not supporting the one main idea per slide?

A few other memorable callouts from the rancheros, from the designers desks, if you will. Is if you highlight everything, you highlight nothing. So think about again, what's the one main idea and how do you highlight that? Because you cannot possibly have everything in bold. Everything is a title.

Everything is the bullet. They're not gonna remember anything. So just keep it so much more symbol than you think, you know. What is the shape of this idea or action is a really good starting point for conceptualizing your slides. If you're not sure where to start, think about again, is it, what type of slide is this?

What am I trying to communicate, and what would that shape look like? And that'll help you build into like a timeline, a [00:18:00] funnel, a workflow, a comparison. It's really helpful to have. So we are gonna have many a blog post on this in the upcoming future, and we will be, uh, hopefully offering a. How to design, uh, presentation design, excuse me, for the non-designer by, from our very own technical director, Steve Sheets.

He is, um, brilliant with it. So to open up a very quick spice cabinet for this episode, I will link some of the blog posts and the slides that I referred to here. Very helpful to help determine the shape and the one idea per slide. And I also wanna call out our episode 67 in which we really deep dived into jd, uh, David, JP Phillips', uh, death by PowerPoint, TED Talk.

It's a great starting point. I think so much of it is relevant, and I think the only thing that I really wanna call out as been an update in 10 years is that. You know, six, six elements per slide is plenty, and I'd say even less is better because people's attentions fans are so much shorter with [00:19:00] short form video content and just the massive amount of information people are presented with these days on a day-to-day basis.

So. It's a great place to start and how to avoid death by PowerPoint is something we're always coming back to, and that's a catchy phrase for what is ultimately like, what are the rules of visual storytelling. Visual storytelling is very buzzy, very catch phrases, and we are on a constant journey to define and really put tactical pieces of advice for people that aren't like, like myself, I've, I'm, I'm a can user and I don't know how to use Photoshop very well.

But even just being able to live sketch, use shapes and build in very simple style choices within my deck has been extremely helpful. So you can do it. Don't be intimidated. I hope these tips were helpful. What did I miss? Let me know. Send us a DM anytime on LinkedIn. Presentation Thinking Podcast or at Ghost Ranch PT on Instagram.

In the meantime, we do have a very [00:20:00] exciting event coming up. This. July, it's called Story Camp, where we'll, we will be combining these, uh, rules of visual storytelling, the elements of story, stage, and screen. So we're talking delivery, we're talking about the story itself, and then we're talking about, yeah, the screen, the visual piece, like how do you actually execute the story as well with three incredible workshops.

We've got Dr. Amy Cuddy. We've got Dr. Steven Frank Cony, and we've got amazing, um, speech writer and speech expert. Terry Zoo Platt former, uh, white House speech writer. We're really excited. This is gonna go down in Park City, Utah, July 23rd to 24th, and you can find out more details@storycamp.com. So thank you for joining this very short Be Sweet Death by PowerPoint.

Update rules of what are the updated rules of visual storytelling with me. A, a fellow non-designer. Don't, don't be intimidated by PowerPoint. Embrace the madness. I. I will also be linking [00:21:00] our quick tip tutorials from technical director Steve Sheets, if you need more, where this came from. And in the meantime, Keon pitching.