Graphic Design 101: Text, especially in larger quantities, full sentences or small sizes must, above all else, be reader-friendly.  It simply has to be easy to read or your audience will not bother to put the effort into digging through it. And to make text the most difficult to read, the most uninviting, set it in ALL CAPS. (When you see all caps in a legal document you can be sure the lawyer who wrote it doesn’t want you to read it.)

Using all capital letters in a short headline can suggest importance or formality. In long strings of text the eye sees all caps as a mass of unintelligible scratching. Capital letters have no descenders or ascenders to help the reader quickly scan and assimilate the “shape” of the word. We are then forced to tediously read each letter and each word as a separate entity.

Be kind to your audience, if your text is more that a few words, avoid ALL CAPS.

Puppies and little kids in Super Bowl commercials, cat videos, and little ones selling lemonade — there may be no greater power than when you use cute to grab some attention, even if it is a little off message. If you can show a picture of your kids and tell a relevant story about the time they learned a life lesson you will hit a home run.

Emotions connect deeply.

Every part of your presentation should move your audience toward the goal that you set for the entire presentation. Simply dumping a data set into a graph in PowerPoint only gives your audience part of the story — just the raw information.

You are the expert. Ideally they want to know what you think, what you have discovered about the subject and how you see things. Give your charts and graphs a point of view by emphasizing the specific data that is critical to their understanding of your big idea or goal. Pull out the important numbers, enhance their display and show how those numbers are so important to the overall understanding of the content. Then add a headline and a sub headline that focuses their attention and you have a powerful graph that both shows the data and delivers your point of view.

Even in a short presentation it can be useful to offer your audience a quick look at an agenda. Show them where you are going, possibly discuss each item quickly and then dive into the actual content. At various times throughout you can even check back in and display an updated agenda to display your progress (perhaps with a highlight pointing to where you are at the moment). It shows your listeners where you are headed and gives them hope, if they need it, that you are actually getting somewhere.

The highlight technique used in this slide is a little more professional and inviting then the standard bullet — a great, but subtle, way to get away from those boring PowerPoint defaults.

It is the small touches like these that will set your presentation apart as top-notch.

A common mistake I see with business presentations at all levels is when the speaker’s words don’t match the visual on the screen.

More often than not the cause is because the slide for the previous comment stays on the screen too long. The speaker has moved on to a new topic or sub-point but there is no new slide — he or she just leaves the old one on the screen. This becomes a disconnect for the audience — two simultaneous messages that don’t work together.

What may be worse: the longer the slide and the words don’t match, the more obvious and distracting it can become.

There are at least two simple solutions.

1. If you don’t have an appropriate visual then black out the screen — either with a blank slide or by using the black-out function in PowerPoint or Keynote.
2. Increase your preparation efforts so that your words and subject areas have visuals that coordinate — even through the transitions.

Left on the screen too long, even the best slides start to stink.