Designing good slides: rules for clear presentations

Slides are not a document. They accompany a talk, live or narrated, and are meant to make what is said visible: a structure, a comparison, a figure, an image. Anyone who uses slides as a script and writes down everything they want to say forces the audience to read and listen at the same time. Doing both at once rarely works.

Hence the most important rule: the slide shows, the speaker explains. What the speaker says does not have to be on the slide. What is on the slide does not have to be read out.

Each slide should carry exactly one message. A helpful test: write the headline as a full sentence containing that message. Instead of “Revenue 2025”, it reads “Revenue abroad grew twice as fast as at home”. The rest of the slide supports the message, for example with a chart.

If you cannot phrase a single message, the slide is too full or too unclear. Split it. More slides with one message each are better than a few overloaded ones.

Less text does not mean no text. Keywords, a key statement or a short list help people grasp the structure. As a rough guide: if the audience has to read for more than a few seconds, it is too much. Full sentences belong in the headline or the speaker notes, not in bullet points.

Images and charts are powerful, but only when they show something that aids understanding. Decorative photos that merely fill space distract. A good chart reduces data to what matters for the message and highlights the decisive point, for example with colour.

The audience’s eye follows the visual hierarchy: large before small, bold before faint, top left before bottom right. Use this deliberately. The message sits large at the top, evidence below, minor details small or not at all.

Pay attention to legibility. Text must be readable from the back row of a room and on a phone. It needs strong contrast with the background; light grey on white or text over busy photos is hard to read. Use a few colours with fixed meanings and one, at most two, typefaces. Aligning elements to a grid and keeping spacing even looks calm and professional.

Slides for e-learning and video have additional requirements. They are often viewed on small screens, so type must be larger and content leaner than in a lecture hall. If a visible speaker stands next to the slide, it needs space that is not taken up by important content.

Graphics that build up in time with the explanation help especially: the audience sees exactly the part being discussed. And text that exists as real text rather than as an image can be translated and read aloud by screen readers.

In Universe a slide consists of narration and a visual: a template such as bullet list, comparison or key figure, an explainer graphic, an image or a freely designed canvas with up to 40 elements. Explainer graphics are created as text rather than pixels, build up in time with the narration and can be translated. In the slide editor, elements snap to edges and centres, guides show what they snap to, and a history with named versions keeps every state.