Many people ask us at Dale Carnegie, what should I do with preparing my slide deck for my key note presentation? What’s too much? What’s too little? What’s the best way to make this work for me? That is what we will explore in this week’s show.

Here’s some guidelines for using visuals. Less is definitely best. On a screen try to avoid paragraphs and sentences. If you can, use single words, and bullet points. Single words can be very very powerful. Just one word or even just one number can be very very powerful and then you can talk to the number, or you can talk to that word. Or just a photograph or a simple visual and you talk to the visual.

You don’t have to crowd the screen with stuff that we can read ourselves. What you really want is the audience to be focused on you, the presenter and not what’s on the screen. This is very critical. We don’t want the screen competing with us so the less you have up there the better, because people look at it two seconds, they’ve got it and then they come back to you. Which is where you want them.

And I mention that two seconds because I believe that the two second rule is a key rule. If you are putting something up on screen and an audience cannot see that and understand it within two seconds, it’s probably too complicated.

Generally the six by six rule means that less is best. Six words on a line and six lines maximum on a screen is good. With fonts, try to make fonts easy to read. You might use for the title 44 font size, and for the text a 32. In terms of font types, sans serif fonts like Arial are very easy to read.

For visibility, be careful about the using underline and bold. Italics are also not easy to read. Pictures are great. Pictures have a lot of visual appeal and as we say, a picture is worth a thousand words. In two seconds they’ve got it. Now they’re ready for your words to talk about the relevancy of this visual image.

Colors are tricky, you rarely see people using them. Colors like black, blue, green - they work very well on a screen. Stay away from oranges, greys and red. Black and blue work together well as a contrast, as does green and black.