The Simplest Way to Make Your Message Stick

How does visual design influence how your message is understood by the audience? Your visual design has a massive influence on how your audience understands your messages, remembers them and can acts on them, but not in the way you typically think. It's not about the right logo design or picking the perfect colors for the fonts, or arranging the fonts. No, the number one thing you can do with a visual presentation of PowerPoint is have one image per slide where someone sees it and within two seconds can instantly understand the idea you're trying to communicate and connect it with some purpose of your message that is the most important. I've seen companies spend tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars on visual design elements for their PowerPoint and not a single person in the audience remembered anything about it. Might not have hated it, but it was completely unmemorable because it was too abstract. Too many numbers, too many bullet points, too many complex lines and graphs and charts. Whereas I've seen other people take one pic, put it up for one second, and everyone got it and it drove home the point. I often in my own PowerPoint presentations on how to give an important presentation stress to people, narrow your message down to a handful of points, do that before you do anything else with your presentation, and that will increase your chances dramatically of being successful in your speech. Most people have the mistake of doing a big data dump. So when I'm telling you, prepare for your speech, think about this first. And I pull up a slide. It's just a simple picture of my own hand, five fingers on it. Is it a great visual design? No. Does it ever win any graphics awards? No. But does it work? Yes, it does. People remember. I have people come up to me years later, sometimes holding out their hand with a five finger, saying, hey, tj, I'm still narrowing my speech down to five ideas, just like you said, and I'm the best speaker in my company every day. So that, my friend, is the most important thing about the visual design and how it has an impact on your audience. And unfortunately, most people these days still think of a PowerPoint as just the poor man's, the poor woman's teleprompter, where they're putting up a bunch of words. Anytime you put text on a PowerPoint slide, you're wasting your time. Don't take my word for it. Test your audiences in real life. I guarantee you they're not going to remember those words unless it's one word with an image on it and it somehow resonates. If you want to have words, give people an email, give them a book, give them handouts. You don't need to put it up on a big screen. Think of the best movies you've ever been to, that you like. I don't care if you love Wicked or Mission Impossible, unless they're just trying to tell you. Langley, Virginia, head of the CIA. 98%. What you see in a great movie, it's never text. It's one scene at a time, one conversation, or one action bit at a time. That is the most effective way to use visuals in your presentation.