Thread by @circuitlions

So @bokista (and @ibogost, I think) asked about what my "secret" to good slide design is, and I've been trying to think about this more systematically lately (so I can teach others), so here's a few thoughts and best practices, with examples. <thread>

First: why? I'm an academic, and I now teach big classes, so I have to rely on lectures. And b/c I teach a visual medium (videogames), I need to use a visual medium (slides) to convey information.

And as an academic, I've looked at a lot of other peoples' slides, and I'm just ball parking here, but I'd say roughly 90% of academic slides are shitty. Not only bad in a design sense, but *actively working against* their function as teaching materials.

Point 1: You must recognize that your visual materials are competing with a student's entire ecosystem of media consumption. Meaning, if your slides are boring, repetitive, poorly designed, etc., you've lost their attention from the beginning.

So must every professor now be a graphic designer? No, but you should understand some fundamentals of page design, typography, color, and spatial relationships. (I'm especially surprised when game designers are bad at this.)

Point 2: First step, minimize the amount of text on a slide. People treat slides like they're a scarce natural resource. There is no reason that a bullet list has to live on one page. Introduce the topic on one slide, then give each bullet point its own slide.

Point 3: Images are powerful. They convey a lot of information. Make them fill the screen. Make sure they're high-resolution so they don't look like a Spongebob meme. Especially for games, show rather than tell.

Here's an example where I am explaining the rules of a war game using images and minimal text. I picked my colors from the image itself, so it creates a coherence between images and words.

Here's another. Note that students aren't intended to read the combat table, just see it.

Point 3: Color. Less is more. Choose two, maybe three, and stay consistent throughout the entire deck. Templates are helpful here, but again, you can grab complementary colors from the images in your deck.

Here's an example from a lecture I gave on resumés. Yes, I know, that could be THE MOST BORING lecture ever. I took it as a serious design challenge. Student feedback was that it was one of the best slide decks they'd seen. On resumés, folks.

My palette: orange + blue (UVA!)

And another from that deck. Again, using my two key colors, plus some grays and shadows to make things pop.

Point 4: Your presentation is a performance, and your slides establish a rhythm. Give your audience time to breathe. My students will know that I love doing these big "statement" slides with all caps, like I'm shouting an important point.

Sometimes I deliver them like a punchline, but even if there's a joke, there's a point buried within. When students are laughing, they're paying attention, and they're usually relaxed, which means they're probably open to ~~learning~~

Point 5: Be careful with humor. As I tell my students, if you have to ask, "Am I funny?" you probably aren't (sorry). But you do not have to be funny to be a good presenter. Be yourself. But omg, if you like visual jokes, slides are VERY GOOD for them.

Point 6: Learn the tool that works for you. That last slides has a "wizard" constructed from the built-in Keynote objects. I use these all the time b/c they're fast, flexible, and moderately absurd (like all clip art).

Emoji are equally useful in this regard. Students are fluent in this language, there's a billion of them, and (surprise) they often condense complex textual information into visual shorthand.

Point 7: Visual layering can make boring text look interesting. When I'm at a loss for what to put on a slide, I often drop an image in the background, overlay a dark transparent rectangle above it, then drop text on top. You get 2 info streams at once.

Point 8: There are no shortcuts here. Slides take a lot of time to develop. Sometimes one slide takes me an hour to put together (see image). A conference talk, 20 hours. A lecture, several days or weeks.

I sometimes use templates, but usually for their (a) typography pairings and (b) color palettes. Otherwise, I start from a blank slide and design **according to the content**. But I now have my own custom templates and slides as a library to work from.

Also, sometimes I just love designing and like to show off. 💅

Point 9: I use slides to "think" through a lecture. Your lecture should have an argument (or story, if you prefer). When text, voice, and image combine, they can be rhetorically powerful. I storyboard with my slides, writing small notes on each before I design them.

This is more a teaching point, but my lecture style is basically the Socratic method. I like posing broad questions, getting students talking, countering their points (sometimes to an absurd level), *actually listening*, and synthesizing arguments together.

Point 10: I owe this to @tadleckman, but video can be really interesting in a slide format. And I mean *embedded video*, not YouTube links that break your slide flow (which I am still guilty of).

Last year, I wanted to lecture on the meanings of systems, specifically in Shadows of Mordor, and got stuck with mere screenshots. With that game, you needed to see the systems (and violence) in action. So I captured a bunch of PS4 footage and put it in my slides.

No surprise: videogame students loved seeing video. And I loved the ability to overlay text on the fly to point out key areas. Now, I've started incorporating video in most lectures. (Use sparingly—this can also make students zone out.)

And again, I don't think this lecture would have worked with your standard, boring, bullet points and a screenshot.

Some takeaways. Stop blaming your students for not paying attention when your visual materials are thoughtless and bland. (Yes, phones are an issue, but we have responsibility as well.) Your audience deserves better. Just a *bit* more effort goes a long way.

Two years ago, I was assigned to deliver slides to the incoming freshman game design students. I was appalled at the slides I had to work with. Look at this shit. Would you enjoy being at this presentation? Would you even enjoy delivering this information?

The following year, I redesigned them. I thought the students deserved better. And more importantly, I thought they would retain more information if I presented it well. (And this was the birth of my "UVA template.") A rather thankless job became pretty fun.

I even provided a link for students to download the presentation slides. And get this—a lot of them did. CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE???

So if you're that academic who's throwing together bullet points minutes before a lecture, a job talk, a conference presentation, or even just a meeting with your colleagues—you're dooming your audience to boredom.

STOP drowning your audience in text. STOP conserving slides like they're an endangered species. STOP using Arial because it's the default. STOP pretending like students don't have a buffet of awesome media to look at instead of your slide deck. It's not working.

This isn't some skill I was born knowing. I've never taken a graphic design class. When I started at UCSC, my slides were OK. But three years later, after several hundred slides and several hundred hours, I know what I'm doing (usually). And students notice.

Every single quarter, a student mentions slide design in my evaluations. Better slides enable better teaching.

I have a lot more to say, but I'll leave it at that for now. I hope you folks find this helpful.💚

</thread>

Oh! I should also shout out some of my colleagues who are solid slidesmiths: @tadleckman, @Swenyo, and @manyweare (no coincidence that they are all art folks & good teachers)

& special s/o to former CM PhD student @xfoml, who gave some of the best presentations I've ever seen.