Graphics: Good & Bad Examples

Television will complicate your looks and your presentation so that your message is easily lost. We know you would rather use some easy ways to be in control of your talk and TeleMedicine's methods are carefully developed by speakers such as you to effectively deliver your message.

Suppose your goal is to present the following television presentation tips:

• TV flattens its subject. As a result, amplify your speech and exaggerate hand gestures; they will look "normal" to your audience.
• Speak slowly so your audience will have time to process the information.
• Look at your audience on the monitors as you would in a normal conversation
• Organize your content into clear, concise, and meaningful points that your audience can follow.

The following would be two ways to make supporting slides.

To provide some instruction on creating slides to support your points, you have the following points:

• Present primary points using simple, key-word phrases; complete sentences take too long to read
• Too much text makes slides difficult and undesirable to read
• Avoid using subtext: it presents too much information and dilutes the punch of a main point. If the subtext is important, it should be a main point.
• Use sans-serif fonts (Arial, Helvetica, etc); serif fonts (Times New Roman) are too busy and will flicker on TV
• Large point size is the single best thing you can do to improve your look on television. The distortion caused by the compression of the television can make fonts as small as 24 point unintelligible.

The resulting supporting slides can be either bad or good.

When creating charts and graphs keep the following in mind:

• Use 2D charts; 3D charts (the default in Excel and PowerPoint) will vibrate on television
• Simplify chart data and concentrate on one or two points per chart
• Never use a background grid (the default in Excel and PowerPoint)
• Abbreviate recognizable information in labels such as using '96 instead of 1996, 3K instead of 3,000

The following are two ways to present the same information.

When presenting these chart guidelines an effective slide would look like this.

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