The REAL Danger of Slide Templates
It’s not hard to make a well-designed slide deck– you don’t even need a designer to do it.
There are so many tools and templates that help you create beautiful and uncluttered slides with as much effort as choosing and trying on a pair of shoes.
I’ve personally been grateful to Canva because I no longer get requests to do what it does effortlessly.
What are the biggest challenges with slide templates?
But how do you find the right template for your message from the thousands available?
Not everybody has a fully developed brand and supporting team behind them. If you do, your slide template is already chosen for you based on your brand.
If you don’t, you will have so many choices to make that you’ll spend too much effort where it’s not worth the payoff.
Colours?
Straight or curved edges?
Charts? 2D or 3D (never use 3D)
Photo overlays?
Photo style?
Worrying about these details isn’t a good use of your or your team’s time.
What are the pitfalls of using slide templates?
Slide templates can be helpful when you know what you’re looking for and find it.
But in my experience, they usually lead to these common problems:
Because they’re easy to use, everybody uses them. Including your competition, from whom it might feel hard to stand out positively.
If you have a brand, you might need to conform your message to fit the guidelines, leading to run-of-the-mill, staid, and static stories.
For a lot of people, slide templates feel like positive play. But we’re not in pre-school sticking our hands in the sand and pulling out dinosaur figurines. You end up wasting time doing work that doesn’t matter. Instead, you can go for a walk in the neighbourhood to get a better frame of reference for a metaphor to deepen your audience’s connection to your presentation.
What do they want instead?
What’s the alternative?
Slides that make you feel confident. They make your brand feel premium, and you look like the expert you are.
Let’s accept for the moment that the medium is the message, then your slides are the stereo, either pissing off your neighbours or making them dance.
You can do this with a simple template process centered on you, and maximizes your audience’s understanding and ability to take action from your content.
What is your POV on this topic?
I think of slide templates as I think of presentation software.
They are TOOLS, not SOLUTIONS.
You can create great presentations with templates and save some design time, but if a template is your starting point, you will run into one of those three problems I mentioned above.
And truthfully, you’d be better off going to a cafe and culling your memory for anecdotes than scrolling pretty slides. You can also fall into the trap of putting content in the slides that you become attached to and don’t edit out to spare your audience.
The reason TED talks are great is not the slides.
The reason they’re great is that they’re under 20 minutes.
They’re under 20 minutes because they focus on the story and content, blocking out everything else.
Having a solid story and outline before touching your slides is what the pros do.
They spend weeks developing messages in their mind and on paper before starting slides.
A Final Note: Don’t Underestimate the Power of Storytelling
I once worked with a very famous keynote speaker on his deck for one of my client’s events.
Although he was a media personality and had a great camera and stage presence, he wasn’t a trained keynote speaker in the way those in the event industry think of them (think: ready-made and rehearsed talk, press kit, and all the accouterments).
We traveled a few weeks before the event to hash out the theme and structure of his presentation. This got him thinking about stories, which he did with the million other things he does.
We used the time we had at his place of business and home to hire a film crew and conduct some interviews with his team and community members. Over the next few weeks leading up to the event, we edited all of those video interviews to tell a story of his business’ environmental and social impact. That amounted to about 12 minutes of his presentation.
But the details of the actual stories he would tell on stage for his remaining 33 minutes were not forthcoming from the speaker despite numerous attempts to get them.
With each passing day, I was getting more into a panic. I began improvising. I created a visual model for the framework we discussed that he’d use to structure the stories. And we asked for a few photographs to add color to the stories he would talk about.
I never heard his stories until he gave his presentation in front of an audience of 200 people.
There were TEARS.
People opened their HEARTS and MINDS.
And a little later, they opened their WALLETS for charity.
Lesson learned: Trust yourself to be the bearer of your story, put your work into developing your content, and stop wasting time on slides—template or not.
Moving the room from their seats to action has almost nothing to do with the template you choose for your slides.
Does your presentation story need help standing out? Book an Outspoke Roadmap today.
