You will be able to make slides that people can read in a room, on a call and on a phone.
Slides are usually built on a laptop at arm's length and then shown somewhere else: on a projector at the front of a room, in a video call window, or on someone's phone. Text that was easy to read while you were building the deck can turn out too small, too faint or too crowded in any of those three places. A slide that cannot be read has failed before the presenter says anything about it.
Take a training room at a hotel in Novena (an illustrative scene). On the screen is a slide with grey text on a pale blue background, set in a small font. From your seat in the back row you lean forward and still cannot make it out. The person beside you photographs the screen with a phone and zooms in, and soon half the room is doing the same.
Body text of around 24 point or more, with larger headlines, is a widely used rule of thumb. The 24-point figure is a guide rather than a fixed standard, because how big text needs to be depends on the room and the screen it is shown on. When decks get size wrong, the text is almost always too small, and text that is too big is rare. If you are reducing the font to squeeze everything onto a slide, the usual cause is that the slide holds too much, and a smaller font does nothing to fix that.
Contrast counts for as much as size. Two combinations work in nearly any setting: dark text on white or a very light background, and white text on a dark background. The ones that let audiences down are mid-grey text on a lighter grey, pale colours on white, and words laid over a busy photo. Projectors also wash colours out, so a pairing that looks fine on your laptop can fade on the wall of a bright room.
One quick test covers size and contrast together. Set your laptop down, stand about two or three metres away from the screen and look at each slide in turn. A line you cannot read comfortably from that distance is either too small or too low in contrast, and people in the back row of a meeting room will probably struggle with it as well.
Text that reads well at a distance comes in short lines, with a few words on each line and a few lines on each slide. Keep full sentences for the headline and, at most, a short quote. When a full sentence turns up anywhere else, ask yourself whether those are words you should be saying aloud instead.
A paragraph on a slide causes two problems. People at the back struggle to read it, and it competes with you for attention. As lesson 4.1, "One idea per slide, stated in the headline", explained, an audience busy reading a paragraph is not listening to the presenter.
Wei Ling (an invented example) had a floor-safety slide with three bullet points, each running to two lines. She reduced them to three short phrases: "Same safety module", "Taught on the floor, not in a classroom" and "Signed off by the site supervisor". The detail that had sat behind each phrase went into what she said and into her handout, and those two places are where anything you cut from a slide should go.
Plenty of people will see your slides on a small screen. They may look at them on a phone while commuting, on a tablet between meetings, or open the file on a mobile some days later. In a hybrid meeting, some of the audience may be watching a window only a few centimetres wide.
Before you present, look through the whole deck on a phone. Either send the file to yourself or share it into a video call you have joined on your phone, then scroll through every slide. You are looking for text you need to zoom in to read, chart labels that run together, and colours that vanish on a small, bright screen. Fix each one you find before the meeting.
Arjun did this the night before a talk to clinic managers. On his phone, the day labels on his chart could not be read. He enlarged them and shortened them to Mon, Tue and so on. On the day, two of the managers joined the meeting by video from their clinics.
Most companies supply a slide template with a logo, colours, fonts and layouts. Use it. It saves you time, keeps decks consistent and spares you a conversation with the brand or communications team.
Many templates, though, are designed for looks rather than readability. The usual problems are a small default font, a busy background image, a large logo that uses up space, and a footer packed with text nobody reads. If the template forces small text or clutter onto your slides, depart from it in the way that does least damage: stay with its colours and fonts, pick its plainest layout, increase the text size, and delete whatever is crowding the slide.
People responsible for a brand generally prefer a readable slide in company colours to an exact copy of the template that nobody can read. When you are unsure how far to go, ask whoever owns the template, since many of them keep a simpler layout aside for this purpose.
These points come together in the five-point readability check, which you run on every slide in a deck:
Body text at about 24 point or larger. Strong contrast between text and background. No paragraphs. Nothing that cannot be read on a phone. Nothing from the template that crowds the content.
Most decks contain a handful of slides that fail several of these points at once, so fix those slides before anything else.
In the activity you will go through one of your own decks with this check and fix the five worst slides.
Go through one deck and check font size, contrast and amount of text. Then fix the five worst slides.
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