Slide Design Principles

The average professional sits through over 300 presentations per year, and research suggests audiences forget 90 percent of content within a week. The primary culprit is slide overload: dense bullet points, walls of text, and clip art that add nothing. Cognitive load theory explains why: when audiences simultaneously read text and listen to a speaker saying the same thing, their working memory is split and retention drops. Effective slides complement the speaker rather than compete with them. The goal is not to put your speech on the screen — it is to put on the screen what your speech alone cannot convey.