Stop putting GIFs in presentations, and other tips

Most presentations, especially on technical topics, suffer from simple problems. These problems can be fixed in less than ten minutes. This post is about these tips.

To be clear, most technical presentations also suffer from more complicated and nuanced problems, but that’s a topic for a future post.

While nominally I focus on presentations on technical topics, I think these tips can apply to almost all presentations.

Stop using GIFs

Maybe you think meme-y GIFs make your presentation more relatable and engaging. Maybe because you’re presenting on a somewhat dry or esoteric topic like the merits of the network protocols TCP vs UDP, you think they’ll make your presentation more fun.

I will tell you right now that memes, especially GIFs, have the opposite effect. They cause audiences to disengage.

The absolute worst offenders are rapidly looping meme GIFs. Human brains are mesmerized by these animations. So if you are explaining something complicated with one of these animations on screen, the audience will not be paying attention to your words. They will be watching the GIF. And if an audience misses your words, they will lose track of the story, and when the lose track of your story, they will disengage (and it’s hard to bring them back). Which is ironic, since you added the meme to make your presentation more engaging.

You should not need GIFs or memes to make your presentation engaging! To the right audience, skillfully presenting information is engaging. Focus instead on making the story better.

The only animations you should consider using are those directly related to your presentation. For instance, if you’re giving a presentation on mitosis and want to show an animation of mitosis itself, that’s fantastic (as long the animation is timed to your speech and not looping indiscriminately).

Use paragraph or bullet transitions

Humans cannot process too much information at once. If I put a slide full of bullets and pictures in front of your eyes, your brain has to work to not only decode the information but also decode the order in which to process the information.

Relieve your audiences from figuring out how to process the information on a slide by spoon-feeding their brains. If you have a slide full of bullets, make each bullet appear as you are begin talking about the information in that bullet. So if you have a slide explaining the roughly ten types of clouds, don’t throw up a slide with all ten types visible right away. Start with a slide with no content and the title “Types of Clouds”. As you mention cirrus, show a bullet that says cirrus (and maybe some info about it). As you mention cumulus, show a bullet that says cumulus, and so on.

This is a simple tip but will make your presentation flow much smoother. For reference, at time of writing, you can do this in Google Slides by selecting your desired text box and going to Slide > Transitions > Object Animations > Add animation > By paragraph.

Annotate your slide for emphasis

You want to tell your audience what to pay attention to at every point in the presentation so that their attention doesn’t wander. Paragraph transitions are one way to do that.

Another highly effective way to do that is to use annotations on your slide. The key here is that you want to tell your audience what is most important (and what to remember) on each slide.

Annotations can be as simple as a circle around a word or idea that is important. It can be bold text. It can be red text. Consider adding these annotations in transitions, while saying something that emphasizes that text.

My personal favorite is a text-overlay atop a slide you’ve just presented. Consider a slide called “Types of Clouds” with all the types of clouds listed. Suppose you’ve finished presenting it, in that all the types of clouds are currently showing after you’ve materialized them one-by-one (see previous tip). And suppose the broader point of this slide and your presentation as a whole is that most clouds aren’t all that great.

The slide after the completed slide should be an identical copy except with a text box in the middle with red text and a white background overlaid atop the middle of the slide saying “ALL CLOUDS ARE TOO CLOUDY”. This is effective because it tells the audience: 1) the point of explaining all those clouds was to make this point and 2) if you remember nothing else, remember this.

Give your audience a teaser

Most people put outlines, or road-maps at the beginning of their presentations. These are good (though sometimes too long).

But before your outline, consider adding a single, short teaser slide that tells your audience the BIG IDEA behind your presentation and the insights that led you there. For instance, if you just made a breakthrough in nuclear fusion, you could say: “In this talk we’re going to talk about how we used gold and silver and platinum with ALCHEMY to finally achieve nuclear fusion.”

The teaser is a spoiler, and that’s fine. It’s fine because you’re guaranteeing certain parts of your audience watch until the end. Specifically, the people interested in fusion or gold or alchemy. They now believe there’s something for them in this presentation, rather watching for the first 5-10 minutes wondering if they should continue paying attention.

One other theory I have as to why this works: humans secretly love spoilers. We like reading (some) stories to which we already know the ending. It makes us feel comfortable.

Use slide numbers

Slide numbers allow people giving you feedback and asking you questions to reference the exact slide they are talking about. Just do it.