Tips on Preparing Slides
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Good slides can make or break a presentation so take the time to prepare these well
and think ahead before you start working on them. Having a draft form of the
content is a useful thing to do and allow enough time to work on these.

It is recommended that you have a slide for 1 minute of your talk.

You could use Power Point or Prezi.
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Try not to add too many words to the slides. Think carefully about what you include.
A good recommendation is using 3-4 bullet points on a slide.

It is advised that you don’t read from the slides. Instead, paraphrase the content.

Try and utilise all the space on the slides. Don’t have text in the corner or to one
side.

Be consistent with the colour themes. So, you might have the same themes on each
slide.

Also, consider that some members of the audience may be colour blind. So, good
colours to use in that case are blue and orange, blue and red or blue and brown.

Additionally, you may have some dyslexic members in the audience. In that case,
think about suitable fonts. Sans serif, Arial and Comic Sans are all dyslexic friendly.
Or, Verdana, Tahoma, Century, Gothic, Trebuchet or Calibri are also good
recommendations.

The font size should be around 12-14. You may wish to use a larger font for headings
though.

Try not to use capitals in all the words you use. Stick to upper- and lower-case letters
as you normally would in writing.

Visuals really help support the points you make. Again, take the time to find the right
visuals and use all the space on the slides.

Think carefully about labelling the visuals and refer to your slides when talking about
them. Don’t assume that the audience will know what you are talking about.
Language such as “as you can see” or “it’s clear from this graph that….” is useful.

You may wish to use video to support your talk. But, don’t use anymore than 1
minute and don’t rely on it. Lead into the video and explain why you are showing it.
You could even set questions for the audience members for things to listen out for.

Other ways of including the audience are using quizzes throughout, (i.e. Kahoot) or
asking questions and using props.

Remember, preparing slides is a good way to show off your creative side and is an
integral part to any talk.