261: Powering Up Your PowerPoint with Heather and Alan Ackmann

Pete Mockaitis
Heather and Alan, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Heather Ackmann
Good to be here.

Alan Ackmann
Thanks for having us.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so intrigued that both of you climb stairs competitively. Tell us how did that become a hobby of yours and why do you keep doing it?

Heather Ackmann
Well, “competitively” is probably not the word to describe me; I’m usually like the last to finish. Alan’s got much better time than I do. And our son did it with us last year and he had great time. But we got into it through one of the companies I used to work with; that was TrainSignal, yeah. It recently got bought out – not recently but a few years ago – bought out by Pluralsight – that’s the company now.
But one of our colleagues – he was really involved with the Respiratory Health Association, and he would volunteer with them, and he would climb stairs. And he got our company involved, and our whole entire company like, “Yeah, let’s go climb stairs.” And so, that’s what we did as a company – we all joined a team together and got family members involved, and that’s how Alan got into it.

Alan Ackmann
Yeah, it’s actually a pretty big thing here in Chicago, (a) because there are so many scrapers and (b) because the weather is so terrible for six months of the year. So, you can have a lot of 5K or 10K runs in the summer time…

Heather Ackmann
It’s beautiful.

Alan Ackmann
Right now, I look out the window and it’s nice and sunny, but it’s also -4° outside currently. So that means that people have to find other ways to stay active. So there are climbs for the Hancock building, the Willis Tower, the Aon Center, and a lot of the other iconic Chicago skyscrapers.

Heather Ackmann
But the Hustle Up the Hancock, I personally believe is the most fun to do. They usually put people in the stairwells with the big foam fingers and they’ll high five you every four floors or something and be like, “Oh, yeah!” And they put signs inside the stairwell to tell you how well you’re doing, like, “You’ve climbed higher than the Eiffel Tower.” And it’s a lot of fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s right, Paris. You take that. We’re way taller.

Heather Ackmann
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I did the Hustle Up the Hancock once at Bain and I remember… You talk about competitively – I remember, I think as compared to everybody in the Hustle Up the Hancock I think I was just slightly above average.

Heather Ackmann
Good for you!

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And then as compared to my Bain colleagues I was like last or second to last, and it’s like, “This is how I kind of feel about my career.”

Alan Ackmann
It’s kind of funny – for a while when I was young doing it, it was a question of trying to beat my time from the previous year. And as I’ve gotten a little older into the upper 30s, it’s more like trying to not be significantly worse than my time from the previous year. So, it’s more like competing with previous performances.

Heather Ackmann
Or yourself. I just want to finish at this point. After two kids – yeah, I just want to finish and not pass out and have to be carried out on a stretcher. It’s kind of my goal.

Pete Mockaitis
And you’re succeeding, so kudos on those accomplishments.

Heather Ackmann
Yeah, I’m here to talk about it, so I’m succeeding gloriously.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you two are an interesting couple, not just for your stair-climbing enthusiasm, but also because both of you study and teach on PowerPoint. And sometimes that happens together, or is it all in your own unique context?

Heather Ackmann
Well, on rare occasions we do talk about it together, but most the time we kind of pass projects off to each other. We have our own separate audiences that we train too. Alan deals more with an academic audience – students and other professors.

Alan Ackmann
Yeah, students and professional development for teachers.

Heather Ackmann
Yeah. And I deal more with professionals, people in business context, or more “train the trainer” situations for the professional context.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. So now let’s really… Boy, we could talk about PowerPoint for a long time, and maybe we’ll need a follow-up interview to go into it. So, could you tell us broadly speaking, when is PowerPoint the ideal tool to use, versus when should we use maybe another software, tool, or an entirely different approach to doing a presentation?

Alan Ackmann
For me, I guess it starts not with the question of when to use PowerPoint, but why to use PowerPoint. I think that there are a lot of people who will sometimes go for PowerPoint as the default tool, where they use it either because it’s something that they are expected to use as part of a presentation for example, and so it’s really easy to think about PowerPoint as something that you just kind of inherit.
But if you are making your own choices, then PowerPoint is the best I think when you have an opportunity to use it in a way that will benefit the viewer or listener’s experience, because when PowerPoint I think is used in an unproductive way, it becomes something that is used because it helps the speaker. It turns into something like a teleprompter, it becomes a way of taking the burden of explanation off of you as a presenter, and kind of shunting it off towards the slide themselves.
And in that case it’s not PowerPoint as something that’s going to help a reader understand your main ideas, or organize the logic behind what you have to say, or create some kind of an emotional impact. It’s just a way for an instructor to get through it. So, one of the biggest challenges that I see is people kind of falling into that trap. So, if you don’t have a situation like that where it’s good for a listener, then that by itself is kind of indicative of it might being a bad choice.

Heather Ackmann
Along the same lines, even in terms of our various audiences. There are certain people in both groups, who shun PowerPoint, or just slideware in general, doesn’t necessarily have to be PowerPoint. And the reasons that they shun them aren’t necessarily surrounded about the “When” or even the “Why”, but the tool itself, because it’s been overused or because it has been abused. And those are also the wrong reasons to shun a particular tool. You need to look at, I would say more along the lines of the context, or why it’s helping that particular presentation or that moment.
So, when looking at why you would use a tool such as PowerPoint, like how is it helping that presentation – PowerPoint is created as ideally a visual aid. Why would you need a visual? How is it helping the content of the presentation, how is it helping the speaker collect their ideas or tell that story? And those are the questions you should be asking in helping determine when and how you should be utilizing PowerPoint.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, perfect. I like that. So not just accepting it as the default: “Oh, this is the thing to do because it’s there.” Thinking about it not as a teleprompter, and more a tool for the audience and not for the presenter, and thinking when would a visual really do the trick. So that’s helpful to think about slideware, which is such a fun word. It brings back the consulting days. It sounds so elegant, like glassware in a laboratory. Slideware. So then, let’s talk about slideware. When would you say maybe Prezi or Keynote or something else might be a wiser choice than PowerPoint?

Heather Ackmann
Oh, gosh. Prezi. I don’t use Prezi that often. In fact, you’re familiar with the conference The Presentation Summit?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s ringing a bell. I’ve never been.

Heather Ackmann
Oh, you have to go! It’s so much fun! It’s where all of the great presentation designers and presenters, speakers… Dr. Carmen Simon, who I know has been on your show.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah.

Heather Ackmann
She speaks there, she’s a keynote speaker there almost every year. Everyone loves her. 
So The Presentation Guild is kind of a non-profit organization for presentation designers, people who design presentations, who speak in the industry, who work in the industry. It’s an organization for them. And they go to the Presentation Summit and basically help fellow designers there. Yeah, it’s a place to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool.

Heather Ackmann
So at this conference, someone off-handedly referred to Prezi as kind of a one-night stand – you use it once and… I think that was a bit harsh, but Prezi does have its place and certainly companies do expect – or not expect but request Prezi presentations from time to time. And it does have kind of a unique look and feel, but I’ve also seen Prezi used what I’d say poorly, where it’s just basically sections that have been called out and with the title and the bullets underneath, and it’s just zooming from one place to another.
Another context where Prezi is not really appropriate is for webinars, where you just don’t have the screen capture, the upload, the frame rate to really handle it. So again, you kind of have to think of the environment where you’re presenting, and whether or not it can handle it. I’m an online student at DePaul, and I’ve had some professors try to use Prezi, and when you’re watching back a lecture as an online student you just miss all those animations; it’s just not there. So, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so that’s the Prezi story. So now Keynote is pretty similar to PowerPoint, although with its own flavor. So, how might you speak to Keynote or some of the other slideware tools available?

Heather Ackmann
Honestly I really don’t use Keynote. I know a lot of my PowerPoint MVP colleagues, they use Keynote a lot more than I do. I’m a PC girl; I stick to the PC.

Alan Ackmann
Yeah, in terms of persona, I’m kind of the same way. Thinking back to the old marketing campaigns, I’m much more the dweeby PC guy than the hipster Mac guy in the end. And my loyalty is with PowerPoint, kind of go the same way.

Heather Ackmann
Yeah, they run pretty deep, so…

Alan Ackmann
I think it’s interesting though, with PowerPoint – if you look at it from kind of a market dominance point of view, it’s difficult for me to answer a question about Keynote, because it seems fundamentally to operate along kind of the same software logic that PowerPoint does. So, a lot of the best practices for it are pretty similar. And so in that case you’re talking a little bit about maybe what tool would be optimal, but I don’t think a lot of the underlying strategy would change very much, especially if you think about PowerPoint and Keynote as being something using it purposefully as opposed to what technical advantages it can offer. Can I go back to Prezi for just a second?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure.

Alan Ackmann
So, Prezi is a really interesting use case for me, because it almost reminds me of some of the earlier versions of PowerPoint and how it was marketed. In the earlier versions of PowerPoint, when they were first debuting a lot of animations and transitions, it was all about the new kind of gadgets and impacts that PowerPoint could have, going back a couple of variations back in the program.
And I look at Prezi presentations, and a lot of it reminds me of what you would see in PowerPoint presentations from like 10 years ago, when animations were first becoming available, because when used badly it becomes less about, “Look at the message I have to say” and more about, “Look at what this cool tool can do.” So when people get into Prezi and they get kind of enamored with the various transitions and swoops and zooms and all those things that can really add a neat… I’ve seen a lot of Prezis where they add a lot of neat aesthetic texture, but not a lot where it complements the material.
The exception is when people are giving presentations that are kind of about dealing with the individual components of a larger thing. So, if you’ve got a presentation for example about a departmental reorganization and you want to start with a global view, and then zoom into the individual departments themselves and their components and purposes – that can do a really good job of maybe demonstrating how the individual things fit into the larger perspective, which can really I think serve a very persuasive purpose.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. Or maybe from a sales presentation perspective, if, “Hey, here’s this cool piece of hardware and here’s how it works, with regard to some of the sub-components.”

Alan Ackmann
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I’m with you.

Alan Ackmann
I would love to see a Prezi that’s almost in technical communication, kind of an exploded diagram of components and how the individual component of an engine works, or something like that. Again, that’s a purposeful use, instead of just, “Look at the thing that it can do.”

Heather Ackmann
Yeah. And it’s really hard for individuals who are not naturally visually inclined to be able to take their material on black and white paper and to translate it into something that is largely visual. It’s easy for me to do, but not everyone’s like that. And so, it’s just when you have a tool like Prezi that’s like this large open canvas, where there really isn’t a lot of suggestions – you just see this large open white piece of paper. And I think that kind of just stumps the user, and what do they do? It’s like opening up a white butcher paper almost, like, “What do I draw?” It can be really intimidating, and so without a little bit I think of hand-holding or examples to look at, I just think people just don’t know how to visualize their own ideas in a three-dimensional space, which ultimately that is Prezi.

Alan Ackmann
And a lot of what PowerPoint does through its use of smart art and those kinds of quasi-directed template-driven design, is to give the user that direction that you were just expressing.

Heather Ackmann
At least some kind of ideas with what to do with it, even though they’re not always perfect and they’re not always necessarily helpful to that rhetorical context, to throw out that word there. But it can be helpful, it can be harmful, but I think more times than not those aids in PowerPoint are helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool, thank you. So we talked about when to use a PowerPoint or a Keynote type tool, and then you’ve also done some teaching on some potential uses of PowerPoint, sort of beyond the traditional, “Hey, I’m going to do a presentation. Here’s a slide, here’s another slide.” Can you share some of those?

Alan Ackmann
Well, the one that immediately leaps to mind is kind of the most far-out one; isn’t necessarily a practical one, but the kind of neat, almost artistic experimental work people are doing with PowerPoint in movies, like trying to make little short films or cartoons just using PowerPoint as a device. And those kinds of things are about stretching the boundaries of what is typically considered a presentation software and what it can be. So, the part of me that just likes kind of tracking emerging ways to create art, is fascinated by that.
And a lot of other use cases in PowerPoint get near the further away you drift, almost, from the conventional sales presentation, like for example everybody’s seen a presentation at a wedding for example, where it’s a slide show of the people as they’ve grown up and met. It can play something soft and manipulative from easy listening stations.
But the thing is, a lot of PowerPoint is I think splintering off into little sub-genres like that, where you’ve got PowerPoint that is something like a family togetherness aid. That’s an awkward way to phrase it, but PowerPoint is serving a social function more than a persuasive or professional function there. And the thing that I’m also kind of interested in… Some of my background is in literature and creative writing, before I got into studying professional communication. And we would study different forms of poetry, and formal poetry like sonnets and things like that. And there’s a style of PowerPoint now that’s kind of emerging – Pecha Kucha. Is that how you pronounce it? Well, mangled that one.

Heather Ackmann
I don’t even know if I’m saying it right. It’s one of those words that’s just you look at and…

Alan Ackmann
No, I remember that – it’s like the old Muppet thing – Pecha Kucha. I think that’s how I’ve heard it pronounced.

Heather Ackmann
I don’t know, we’re probably butchering it.

Alan Ackmann
But it’s a very kind of regimented way of doing PowerPoint, where it’s only like 20 slides at 20 seconds each.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, like ignite or a fire or lightening round. I’ve heard them call that at events.

Alan Ackmann
Yeah, everything is constrained, so it’s about what people can do with their material within those constraints. And when I first heard about that I was like, “Well, that’s just adding artifice.” But all art is essentially going to be artifice to some extent, and there’s going to constraints in there, just like you would have a sonnet of I Am, a pentameter in 14 lines, and all the other limitations. So I think it’s fascinating to see little things like that with PowerPoint kind of emerging organically as people start putting in this new formal structure to it.

Heather Ackmann
I think the Pecha Kucha was started by architects.

Alan Ackmann
That makes sense.

Heather Ackmann
They wanted to showcase their designs without talking about them profusely.

Alan Ackmann
That’s really interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s helpful.

Alan Ackmann
That’s the thing about architecture and that struggle between form and function. And it seems like the Pecha Kucha is kind of about that tension to a large extent.

Pete Mockaitis
And so now when you spoke about a family or a togetherness aid, I don’t know if I’m familiar with this usage. Can you unfold that a bit? Is it just for the two of you, or is it for other people?

Heather Ackmann
Well, PowerPoint has brought us together.

Alan Ackmann
No, I was referring more to the PowerPoint at weddings than that kind of thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s what you meant. Okay, I’m following.

Heather Ackmann
And funerals.

Alan Ackmann
Yeah, I’ve seen that too, where people will make at a wake for example a presentation about significant moments in a person’s life. And I think that those kinds of situations are hard for most people. It’s hard to be articulate, it’s hard to say everything you want to say, and so people turn to things like PowerPoint as a means of…

Heather Ackmann
Coping, like a script for the moment.

Alan Ackmann
And as a means of kind of honoring and having a shared experience, where everyone watches the same slides and it triggers the same kinds of memories. And it’s a way of having a more insulated, safer way of grappling with the emotions of those kinds of big things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I like it. Thank you. So now let’s dig into maybe some of the core principles and concepts when it comes to…

Heather Ackmann
Oh, I want to go back a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Heather Ackmann
We talked about some of the uses of PowerPoint that people don’t know – I want to go back to this video thing. He mentioned movies. Well, social media – video is like king in social media right now, but a lot of people just don’t have the budget for a film crew or for just hiring people to develop videos. You can develop right now 4K resolution videos right from PowerPoint, and with the animation techniques that you can create in PowerPoint very simply through transitions like the morph transition – I don’t know if you’re familiar with that one – available with the Office 365 subscription.
Using that morph transition, animating between slides to move objects around and just to animate – it’s so fast. I’ve got a video on that on YouTube right now, just how to morph, use that morph transition – walks you through it. But it’s so easy and you can create really, really nice looking videos and export them right as an MP4. And you can follow the video specs for Twitter, for things like Snapchat. Just create the dimensions of your slide to those output specs and create your social media campaign right from within PowerPoint.
So that is a very simple use case that a lot of people haven’t thought of. And with social media, it changes so rapidly, you have to be able to produce content so quickly. And having that dedicated film crew to use those fancier production tools like the rapid-fire there, the ROI necessarily isn’t right there. But with PowerPoint, it is. You can create it quickly, cheaply, and have just about anyone produce it for those social media channels.

Pete Mockaitis
That is cool, thank you.

Heather Ackmann
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. So now I want to talk a bit about some of the principles and conceptual pillars associated with what makes a slide great. And so Heather, you sort of lay out a number of core principles to start with, with regard to thinking through this, even before we get into a given slide. What are those?

Heather Ackmann
Well, in the course I have on Lynda I kind of lay it out based on what you mentioned – the three pillars, and for that it’s the audience, the environment, and the message or the content that you’re trying to deliver for your audience. And that I just sort of define as pillars, but all that is based on really classic rhetoric.
But when you’re thinking of your slide, a lot of people just sort of think about the message and how it relates in PowerPoint, and that’s as far as it goes for a lot of people. They sometimes forget about the audience. Or maybe they’ll think about the audience a little bit and the message a little bit, but completely forget about the environment, or where the presentation will be held or presented.
And that can have a huge impact on the look of the slides or how the slides are perceived, where you’re presenting such as a huge auditorium with thousands and thousands of people where that message will be projected on giant screens, versus a small tiny boardroom with just 20 people. Or if that PowerPoint’s going to be opened on a mobile device and just read by the CEO of the company very quickly in his car on the way to the airport.
That’s all going to have a huge impact on how that message will be read and perceived. And a lot of people neglect to think about that when designing their slides, in terms of the font choices, even the colors, or the space or layout of information on that slide. And that all plays a part.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so excellent. I’m also thinking in terms of, will they’d be printouts available to folks?

Heather Ackmann
Oh yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And then Nick Morgan’s favorite pet peeve is like, “I know you can’t read this, but…”

Heather Ackmann
Yeah, yeah.

Alan Ackmann
And I encounter that environment limitation a lot, because I teach at university but I don’t teach in the same room every term. And I’ve had rooms before where they’re really deep rooms and they go seven, eight rows back, and others that are more shotgun-style rooms, where it’s three tables or three rows with a bunch of lengthy tables. And so I’ve had times before where I’ve had a slide deck that I would have as a go-to deck for a lecture that I deliver every term. And I’ve had to modify it just because it’s going to be interfering with the environment. And sometimes you really can’t predict or control environments. Going to conferences is a big point of stress for me, partly because you never know what the room is going to be like.

Heather Ackmann
And a lot of times they give you a conference template that some designer created, not knowing what the environment’s going to be like. They booked the rooms after they create the template or the template designers have no idea anything about the specs of the conference itself.

Alan Ackmann
My favorite story about how environment can gum up the works came when I was actually sitting in a presentation. We have department meetings on a pretty regular basis for one thing or another, and there was one time I was at a department meeting where someone was giving a presentation, and it was a session that also had lunch accompanying it.
So I happened to be sitting in the back row, or kind of where they were going to be setting up the lunch buffet, catering was. And it was a lunch food tray that had this really kind of potent-smelling ham that was behind me during the entire presentation. So, I’m sitting there… I was an ideal audience member at that point – I was there by choice, I was actively interested in it, I was taking notes. There was no need to convince me of anything. And I’m just sitting really trying to listen, and all I can think is, “Wow, it smells like ham in here.” And not like good Thanksgiving ham, like a little bit of … to the ham.

Heather Ackmann
I still give this example when I teach, by the way.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve seen a great speaker – when they realize that the wafting scent of the food is there, they’ll sort of take a time-out, check with the organizer: “Can they just eat this now and then I’ll talk after that?” Because then they just know there’s no hope.

Heather Ackmann
That goes back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – your participants are in the room thinking about food, especially when the lunch tray’s delivered. Why would you keep talking? Food comes before anything else.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. And Alan, I really want to follow up on what you said, with regard to if it’s a deep versus a shallow room, you adjust the slides. Can you share what sorts of adjustments do you make within those environmental context shifts?

Alan Ackmann
Well, if it’s a deep room versus a shallow room, the first thing I have to adjust is the size of any text that’s on the screen, the resolution that a slide can support. The further back people get, the harder it’s going to be to be able to track what’s on the slide. And so in those cases if I would have a lecture for example that has kind of an anchor slide at the end, that’s a, “Here are the five most important things to take away from the class period” kind of slide, in a conventional classroom I might make those just a standard top-down bullet point, which I think that is a use case where it’s an appropriate design choice. But if it’s a deeper room, where I think it’s not going to be able to support the font for that, then maybe break that across five different slides and have one point isolated on each slide, in a way that even the people in the back are going to be able to hear it and use it.

Heather Ackmann
Yeah, white space between graphic elements is also important in those larger-room environments too, just to separate elements that don’t go together, because from far away anything that looks close together looks like it goes together. So, they look like one and the same, or they should be one and the same. But with the more space you place between graphic elements, they look more like separate ideas or separate elements.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. That’s a great example there of how with a shift in environment you adjust what you’re doing in the PowerPoint. Could you also give us an example within the realm of audience versus message? Or sorry, so if it’s like, “Hey, if an audience is more like this sort of audience, do this, versus if they’re the opposite, do that.” And likewise, with message.

Alan Ackmann
This is a complicated question, because it starts moving outside of PowerPoint as just a software platform, and into PowerPoint as kind of a presentation practice. To take it back a little bit further from that, just thinking critically about the kind of audience you’re going to be talking to, and what their needs are going to be.
When I’m teaching, for example, it to students, a lot of what we need to do is just make sure that students would understand the concepts that are being presented. So in that case it’s mostly an informative presentation, and that’s different than something like a sales presentation, where you might have some content, but it’s about motivating somebody to a kind of action – you want them to go to a website or consider an idea, versus just trying to get them to understand the nuts and bolts behind a concept.

Heather Ackmann
That’s a good point. For a class situation, there’s objectives, there’s a group of information, material, that as a whole you’re hoping that they’ll take away. Not necessarily remember all at once, as soon as it comes out of your mouth, but you’re hoping that they’ll come back to the lecture materials and then study it on their own and at least remember the concepts to go back to either the textbook, the PowerPoint slides themselves, and basically to further study on their own, because basically your lecture and any PowerPoint slides you provide them are there to hopefully be as a study aid, so for further learning. That’s ideal, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Heather Ackmann
In theory. But in a professional context – and now I’m thinking of Dr. Carmen Simon’s book here.

Pete Mockaitis
Impossible to Ignore.

Heather Ackmann
Impossible to Ignore. So, for that one in that context, you’re wanting to pick out the most important details that your audience wants to remember and turn it into, again, that action item. And so for there, the goal is a very singular point and not a collection of points.

Alan Ackmann
Well, I’m thinking about occasions where the content of what you’re presenting doesn’t change very much, but the audience does, and the kind of things you would do to customize. Some of the most impactful presentations that I’ve seen, and I’m always going all the way back to Driver’s Ed, where there were presentations about drinking and driving, and why you shouldn’t do it.
And they were these very kind of emotionally-hinged presentations with a lot of clear attempts to demonstrate the possible stakes behind drinking and driving. And that’s very different than something that would be given on the same topic to a group of legal professionals about trying to defend and identify a legal standard of what classifies as driving under the influence, and if so, ways to defend or try to prosecute people in those kinds of contexts. Those are heavily logically-driven.
And you could pull in the same statistics about the impact that drinking and driving can have, high frequency among users in a young demographic, consequences, but in one case it’s a larger objective of convincing people not to do it, and in another case it’s a question of, “Here’s how to handle it if you’ve got a client who’s been convicted of drinking and driving.” And that’s very different from somebody where the same information might be, but for an officer who has a job where they’ve identified someone as possibly driving under the influence, and how to kind of identify or deal with people in those kinds of situations.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then from a slide perspective, what do you envision as being some key things you would do differently in that logical argument versus the emotional power persuasion?

Alan Ackmann
Well, this is all strictly back of the envelope here.

Heather Ackmann
Well, for the Driver’s Ed class it would be emotionally-driven graphics, so visuals would be very key there – full color, large…

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like the whole slide there’s a tragic human being, and blood and death.

Heather Ackmann
Yeah.

Alan Ackmann
I don’t think you even need to get graphic.

Heather Ackmann
You don’t even need to get horribly graphic, just suggestive.

Alan Ackmann
Although that is an interesting kind of secondary consideration, is how graphic would be appropriate? But you think of any kind of visual, particularly a pictorial visual, is going to be in many cases emotionally powerful. It’s something that’s meant to have a pathos appeal, versus a logos appeal. And the kind of thing that isn’t going to be effective, at least with the younger demographic in the, “I’m sitting through Driver’s Ed because I have to do it to get my license, and I’d much rather be out doing other stuff” kind of environment – you’re not going to get a lot of time to draw an audience in to the most important things you have to say. And so, the easiest thing to express there is not the kind of statistical ratios; it’s the emotional impact, and choosing visuals would be a short way to do that.

Heather Ackmann
And consequences.

Alan Ackmann
Yeah, consequences, and I’m also thinking about shorter text, less reliance on developing a logical argument, even though there’s obviously going to be kind of an implicit logic behind that “Why you shouldn’t drink and drive.” But those are the kinds of things that would jump out at me first.

Heather Ackmann
Then for the legal situation, it’s going to be a more logical argument. So for there, lawyers do a lot of reading…

Alan Ackmann
Yeah, it’s going to be able to support lengthier quotes, higher reliance on the speaker versus the impact of the slides themselves, because there’s generally going to be a little bit more audience buy-in, where you’re going to able to tolerate a little bit more of a patient delineation.

Heather Ackmann
Quite frankly I don’t envision that talk necessarily being delivered as a talk. I imagine that PowerPoint file being handed off to someone and scanned as they’re going from one place to another. So that’s more of what we’d call a walking deck or an info deck.

Alan Ackmann
Yeah, I use the term “archival slide deck”.

Heather Ackmann
Archival slide deck, whatever term you choose to use for it. But that PowerPoint deck probably won’t be projected anywhere and presented in a traditional sense; it’ll be read. So, that one I think would be designed actually more like a document than a docuslide. I think that’s Duarte’s term, I don’t remember.

Alan Ackmann
I’ve heard docuslide, I’ve heard slideument.

Heather Ackmann
Slideument, yeah. People come up with all kinds of fun words. It’s not like a presentation in the traditional sense, but it’s more like a document. So that’s kind of what I envision for the lawyer audience in the end. For the third audience – that’s the cop – no PowerPoint. That’s all demo, that’s upfront personal demo, no slides.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect, thank you. So now, we’re having so much fun, but I want to make sure that we touch upon a few of the key design principles that show up and slides.

Alan Ackmann
Which one do you want to talk about?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s say hierarchy.

Alan Ackmann
Okay. For me hierarchy is about identifying what the most important element of the slide is, and then picking, making a visual design that is about supporting that main idea. I have a slide in one of my courses, where it’s about how students perceive a presentation and how long they’re willing to listen.
And the slide there is a kind of, not a forced perspective shot, but there is a student in the foreground who’s kind of turned around, and then in the background, farther off in the distance, there’s a blurred out version of a chalkboard or a whiteboard. So you can kind of see that it’s there, but it’s clearly secondary to the student themselves, because that design or that particular slide is not about what the presentation is; it’s about how students are going to respond to presentations, so that gets the visual focus.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you.

Alan Ackmann
And my favorite story on that – my first day of graduate school my instructor was an old Southern lady. And she walked in and said, “This is the most important thing I’m going to tell y’all about writing.” And on the board she wrote down, “Serve the whole.” And what that meant was that in any kind of story or point of communication you identify, “What’s the most important thing I want to say?” and then design secondary choices around furthering that important thing. But the reason I’ve always remembered it is because she had really bad penmanship and she kind of wrote it on the board without reading it out loud.

Heather Ackmann
With this really curly cute Southern scroll.

Alan Ackmann
Yeah. And so it looked like, “Serve the whale.” And so I’m looking at it and I’m going, “Serve the whale? What does that mean?”

Heather Ackmann
She never actually said, “Serve the whole.”

Alan Ackmann
So she just stepped back and had people read it and ponder it. And I’m like, “Serve the whale? What does that mean?” But I caught on after a couple of minutes, like, “Oh, this is ‘Serve the whole’. Oh, maybe graduate school is not hard, okay.” Then I think it’s a really important kind of anchor concept, because hierarchy is about identifying what’s most important. And I just talk about that in a visual way, but it also happens with things like the size of text – larger text is perceived as more important than smaller text, big visuals are perceived as dominant to captions, and those kinds of things.

Heather Ackmann
And for the structure of the presentation as a whole – you can have a hierarchy throughout the entire slide deck – what slides in the presentation stand out? You know how in PowerPoint you’ve got that slide sorter view, where you can zoom out and see all your slides from kind of like this bird’s eye view? What slides stand out? What’s the hierarchy there from that view? What five slides out of that, I don’t know, 100 slides that you have in that presentation – if you have that many – stand out? Because those five slides out of that 100 – those are going to be the ones that in theory will gain or garner that attention, if they do stand out visually. So there’s a hierarchy to the individual slides, the slide deck together, and then from a content standpoint as well. So you’re creating kind of a visual hierarchy and even a content hierarchy.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh excellent, thank you. Well, tell me, Heather and Alan – is there anything else that you want to make sure to mention right upfront, before we hear about a couple of your favorite things?

Alan Ackmann
For me, the most common question that I get is about text on a slide, and how much text should be on there, and how it should be used. And I think that that question kind of comes from misunderstanding how PowerPoint is designed to operate. It’s not a text-based medium; at heart it’s a visual medium that uses text elements. And I think that in terms of my own kind of professional development that I’ve lead, that’s one of ideas that really seems to resonate with people, is thinking of PowerPoint not just as something that contains your script, but as something that is meant to contain visuals that enhance the presentation itself, and considering text as just one of those fundamentally visual elements.

Heather Ackmann
See, for me, when people ask me how much text is allowed on the slide, “How much should I use? Should I avoid it?”, or even when you get to the bullet point question: “Can I use bullet points? Are bullet points okay?”, I really don’t like answering those questions because I just don’t feel that that’s the right question you should be asking. Because again, for me it comes down to the audience, their expectations, the content, the environment, and what’s appropriate to use for that presentation, in that moment, in that time.
And there’s a lot of “ifs” there. And if your audience is expecting text, if they’re hoping for text, like those students in the classroom that plan on using those PowerPoint files to help them study – they expect text, they want text. And it may not be the best visual, it may not be the most engaging, but they want some kind of text document that they can quickly search, quickly scan, and use it to help them study. You may not use that as your lecture slides, but they want something.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect, thank you.

Alan Ackmann
And it kind of goes back to the initial comment that I made when starting this podcast, which is about who the slide deck is designed to benefit. And if it’s a deck that is often designed to help the speaker, it ends up kind of overburdened with text; and if it’s designed to help the audience or the students, then text can be moderated appropriately.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good, thank you. Well now, could you share with us a favorite book, something that you found helpful?

Heather Ackmann
Oh, gosh. Well, my favorite design book… We’ve been talking about hierarchy, space, color, all these different design elements. My favorite design book primer – if anyone’s listening and wants to learn more about graphic design – great primer is by Alex W. White The Elements of Graphic Design. And I strongly recommend getting the hard copy physical book as opposed to the Kindle edition, because the pages are beautiful. So that’s a great one. There’s a lot of other graphic design books out there that talk about the same kind of visual design elements and graphic design elements, but I like Alex White. It’s a quick read, enjoyable read, lots of pretty pictures.

Alan Ackmann
And if I’m picking one that I think has a nice general audience appeal, it would be Nancy Duarte’s Slide:ology.

Alan Ackmann
And I like Slide:ology mostly because it’s got a very academic foundation to it, but it’s not in any way inaccessible. It’s very grounded in best practices, and it’s also very actionable. There’s a lot of little exercises and suggestions about how to create a good deck, in addition to understanding what a good slide deck might look like in a moment.

Heather Ackmann
And of course, Dr. Carmen Simon’s book Impossible to Ignore – we mentioned that one earlier. She’s been on your show.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Heather Ackmann
Love her book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch with you two, where would you point them?

Heather Ackmann
I have a website at HeatherAckmann.com, and I also have a YouTube channel – same thing – YouTube.com/HeatherAckmann.

Alan Ackmann 

The easiest way to actually probably get a hold of me is through DePaul University, where I teach, and my email address is very accessible.

Alan Ackmann
Just go to DePaul’s directory, and I’m really easy to find.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect, thank you. Well, Alan, Heather, thank you so much for sharing this stuff. It sounds like we have much more to dig into, and I appreciate it and I wish you tons of luck, and rocking and rolling tremendous presentations and experiences in the weeks and years ahead.

Heather Ackmann
Thank you!

Alan Ackmann
Thank you so much! Thanks for having us on.