TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

6 Oct 2016 · 3 min

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2:30

TJ Walker (from a 2016 live stream) advises presenters to use images—ideally one image per slide—to convey one idea per slide rather than blocks of text or clichéd clip art. He argues audiences remember images far better than text, and that even poor or clip-art images can trigger audience memory and connection. The speaker emphasizes that the presenter’s goal is to communicate ideas, not win design awards, so images (even imperfect ones) are usually superior to text-heavy slides.

Chapters

When you're creating your slides, you should use images, ideally one image per slide, to convey one idea per slide, or at most, two different images to describe or show two variables that really show one relationship. Now, there are a lot of PowerPoint experts out there who will go on and on and on about how evil clip art is and how bad certain cliched things are, like the question mark or two people shaking hands. And it is true there are some unoriginal images out there. And clipart doesn't impress anyone with your creativity. But you know what else isn't original text. You know what else isn't artistic text? Do you know what else is really cliched bullet points with text. So before you get on your high horse and trash and ridicule anyone using clip art, I want you to use the same ridicule for anyone who gives you a slide or asks you to use a slide with text in it. Because that's just reusing one of 20 some symbols again and again and again from an Alphabet. So here's my experience. Audiences remember images. They do not remember text. Wish it could be different. Wish I could give you different results. They remember images first. Furthermore, they can remember bad images. They can remember a fuzzy photo better than the greatest, slickest PowerPoint slide, with fancy background coloring and fantastic fonts and glimmers and shapes and special effects. So in my experience, bad photos, even clip art, can trigger the memory process in your audience and help them connect to your message. Remember, unless you are giving a new business pitch as a PowerPoint slide designer, your job when you're giving a PowerPoint presentation is not to win awards for your PowerPoint slides. Your goal is to actually communicate ideas, communicate messages. Everything you do should be looked at through that prism. And if that includes using a picture, even a bad picture, even if it's a piece of clip art, if that's all you have, that is radically superior to using a bunch of text.