You will be able to make slides readable in a room, on a call and on a phone.
You are in the back row of a training room at a hotel in Novena. The slide says something in grey text on a pale blue background, and the font is small enough that you lean forward without thinking. It does not help. The person next to you takes a photo of the screen with their phone and zooms in. Half the room is doing the same.
A slide that cannot be read has failed before you say a word about it. This lesson covers the practical checks that make slides readable in a meeting room, on a video call and on a phone screen, which are the three places your slides will actually be seen.
A widely used rule of thumb is to keep body text on slides at around 24 point or more, with headlines larger. It is a guide rather than a standard, and the right size depends on the room and the screen, but most decks err on the other side. If you have to shrink text to fit it on the slide, that is usually a sign the slide has too much on it, not that the font should get smaller.
Contrast matters as much as size. Dark text on a white or very light background, or white text on a dark background, is readable almost anywhere. Mid-grey text on a lighter grey, pale colours on white, and text placed over a busy photo are the common failures. Projectors also wash colours out, so a combination that looks fine on your laptop can fade on the wall of a bright room.
A quick way to test both at once: stand back from your laptop screen, about two or three metres, and look at each slide. If you cannot read a line comfortably from there, the person in the back row of a meeting room probably cannot either.
Readable slides use short lines of text. A few words per line, a few lines per slide. If you find yourself writing full sentences in the body of a slide, other than the headline and perhaps a short quote, stop and ask whether you should be saying those words instead.
Paragraphs on slides cause two problems. They are hard to read at a distance, and they compete with you, as lesson 4.1, One idea per slide, stated in the headline, explained. When the audience is reading a paragraph, they are not listening.
Wei Ling's slide on floor safety originally had three bullet points, each two lines long. She cut them to three short phrases: "Same safety module", "Taught on the floor, not in a classroom", "Signed off by the site supervisor". The detail behind each phrase was in what she said and in her handout.
Many people will see your slides on a small screen. They join a call from their phone during a commute, look at a shared deck on a tablet between meetings, or open the file later on their mobile. In a hybrid meeting, some of your audience may be looking at a window a few centimetres wide.
So check your slides on a phone before you present. Send the file to yourself, or put it into a video call on your phone, and scroll through. Look for text you have to zoom to read, chart labels that blur together, and colours that disappear on a small bright screen.
Arjun did this the night before his clinic managers' talk and found that the day labels on his chart were unreadable on his phone. He made them larger and shortened them to Mon, Tue and so on. Two of the managers joined that meeting by video from their clinics.
Most companies have a slide template with a logo, colours, fonts and layouts. Use it. It saves time, keeps decks consistent and avoids a conversation with brand or communications teams.
But templates are often designed for looks rather than readability. Some have a small default font, a busy background image, a large logo that eats space, or a footer full of text nobody reads. Where the template forces clutter or small text, break from it in the way that does least damage. Use the template's colours and fonts, but choose its plainest layout, make the text bigger, and remove the elements that crowd the slide. Most people who look after a brand would rather see a readable slide in the company colours than a perfect copy of the template that nobody can read.
If you are unsure, ask the person who owns the template. Many have a simpler layout tucked away for exactly this reason.
When you review a deck, run through these five points on every slide: body text at about 24 point or larger, strong contrast between text and background, no paragraphs, nothing that cannot be read on a phone, and nothing from the template that crowds the content. Most decks have a handful of slides that fail several of these at once. Those are the ones to fix first.
In the activity you will go through one of your own decks with this check and fix the five worst slides.
Review one deck for font size, contrast and text length, and fix the five worst slides.
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