So I’m gadding about again tomorrow, back to Aberdeen to talk about the Women’s Cycle Forum so naturally I was still writing my presentation at the last minute. Well, I say writing, but my tactic with giving presentations is to throw together a lot of slides with images that illustrate what I want to say, and then stand in front of them and just wing it, because I’ve spent way too many hours of my life listening to a man in a suit reading his Powerpoint slides to us. It generally makes for an amusing,* if occasionally a bit random, presentation but it does take forever to create the slides, as I worked out this evening
Anyway, if you want to find out whether I ever did track down that image of a princess doll in a ball dress on a toy bike with a cup holder** that I thought was a celebration of cycle chic and everyone else on Twitter thought was the worst case of pinking it and shrinking it they’d seen in ages, then get yourselves along to Aberdeen to hear from a couple of awesome cycling women, and me.
* At least I hope it’s amusing. People laugh, anyway, and you don’t always get that in road safety conferences.
** Spoiler alert: I didn’t
Town Mouse 
On a mine in Namibia in the 1980s when summoned to Joburg to present a paper at a conference you made your slides longhand, you gave them to repographics who gave you 35 mm projector slides a week later. It was a good idea to get it right first time. I used to write the script, boil it down and then work out the minimum number of slides required to make the points I needed to make. I still work that way, or I did until I retired, being a firm believer in 10 slides being enough, including the hello slide with title and final slide with thank you.
The advantage of this method was that you minister bullet points by putting the odd photograph of new and big machinery, the audience were always small boys at heart.
I don’t do presentations or slides but as I understand it there has been a trend to less info on each slide. So absolute number of slides might be higher, but less words per slide. In extreme cases one word per slide (obviously as a prompt/concept not to turn a phrase into 6 slides). Also read about a strict 20 slides 20 seconds per slide concept – only for the well rehearsed that one.
I believe the slide rule was invented some time ago…..
I do remember the days of photocopied acetates, including a memorable presentation where the speaker dropped their acetates right at the start, and then proceeded to give their presentation in random order…
More pictures, less text, is definitely the rule to follow. The people in the audience are there to listen to you (and hopefully interact), not read!
I give many presentations and most have very little text but lots of images. I usually spend 1-2 minutes per slide talking and interacting when possible… and totally wing it usually which is both fun and nerve-wracking at the same time. 🙂
But finding images that give exactly the message you want is indeed a challenge.
Yup, I actually mostly have no words at all.