Guide to Making a Pecha Kucha Presentation: Slide Design

Large images work best. I’m a fan of filling the entire workable space with an image. Assuming that there will be a large crowd in attendance, imagine being someone way in the back. It’s better that everyone sees the image on your slide, versus someone not being able to see it. For my money, an image can’t be too large… but it can most definitely be too small.

Use as little text as possible. The more words on your slide, the more time the audience will spend reading (and not paying attention to you). A failing in 90% of all slides is the curse of too much text. Remember that the main focus here is you talking, and the purpose of the slide is that it supports your words… not the other way around.

The slide should be an addition to, not a summary of, your ideas and concepts. I know it’s a hard thing to do, but fight the impulse to put all the points you want to cover onto the screen. Otherwise, you run the risk of turning your presentation into a speed-reading exercise for your audience.

No more than four images per slide. In my talk, I used a variety of images. Some slides were one large graphic, other slides were split into two tall, vertical images. And I had a few slides that were sectioned off into four images.

When I tried to address every image in the slide that was split into four… I found myself rushing a bit (and was barely able to hit each one). In the span of about 20 seconds, I’d say that four images is about as much as you can touch on, if you want to say something specific about each image.

Make things consistent. However you choose to display images, try to make them consistent, slide to slide. If you plan on adding in small “titles” to each slide, try to make the placement of these titles consistent. Use the same font for each title.

In designing your graphics, it’s oftentimes easy to get lost within each individual slide. Remember that these slides will be shown together, as a group. The more consistency there is, the easier you make it for your audience to see connections between the slides.

And on top of that (and perhaps most importantly), if you apply a consistent look and layout aross all your slides… your slides will automatically look that much more professional. I can’t stress this consistency thing enough.

Flickr: You can perform an “advanced” search on Flickr and specify only images that have a Creative Commons license (image attribution is often one of the requirements).

Image*After: A large, free collection of photos. Images can be downloaded and used for both personal and commercial purposes.

Stockvault: A photo sharing site with images from designers, photographers and students. Commercial use is NOT allowed, but personal use or internal presentations is acceptable.

morgueFile: The site name refers to old files/notes kept by criminal investigators and newspaper reporters, for use as quick references. High-res images are available for personal and commercial use, so long as the image is altered in some way.

Pow!: A large collection/list of stock photography resources.

iStockphoto: Royalty-free images, available for purchase based on a “credit” system. Great quality, but you need to pay for the images (worth it though).

Gimmestock: High quality images for $1 each.