We’ve all been there. You are editing a slide and you’re making changes but it’s not really getting any better. You change the color of something, increase the spacing, nudge something a little to the left, and it kind of looks the same. This is a very typical state to find yourself in, and it’s usually because you’re working on the wrong thing. Instead of making more edits, you need to change how you’re thinking about the slide. So step one is step away from the slide and remind yourself what you’re trying to accomplish with that slide. If you can’t figure that out, then no amount of editing is going to fix it.
So write down what you hope people take away from the slide in one sentence. Then look at the slide again. If what you wrote down doesn’t match what you see on the slide, then you need to change the slide’s structure, not its formatting. Starting over with a blank slide and just typing in what you wrote down will often give you better results than making more edits. So, again, instead of making more edits, you need to change how you’re thinking about the slide. Something else you can do is test how long it takes to understand your message.
Look at the slide for a few seconds, and then look away and try to recall what you see. If you can’t really remember, then the slide’s structure needs more work. When a slide is working well, you should get an immediate sense of what it’s about. To practice this, spend a minute or so going through a few slides and just looking at each one briefly to see what you remember about it afterwards. That will help you see which slides are working well and which ones need more structural work. One thing that happens when you’re in the mode of needing to change how you’re thinking about a slide is that we often end up polishing the slide’s chrome.
So we’ll spend a lot of time making little adjustments to colors and shapes and visual effects, but those things won’t actually help fix the underlying problem. Instead, you can try removing elements from the slide one at a time and see how the slide changes. If the slide seems better after you remove something, then that means you didn’t need it. So that’s a good way of working on getting a slide down to the bare essentials. Sometimes, though, the only way to break out of the editing trap is to start over fresh with a brand new slide.
So take the idea of the current slide and try making a brand new slide with the same point, but this time make the slide look different. This will give you a fresh start and help you see if there’s a better way to communicate the idea. It may not work perfectly, but it will get you out of that cycle of editing the same elements over and over and over. It can be especially helpful during this phase to practice for a very short amount of time. So spend 15 minutes taking a slide and making 3 versions of it with different structures.
Don’t use the same structure for all three. Then step back and compare them and pick the one that works best. This is a way of practicing how to be flexible and not get stuck in a single structure. So, the thing about this phase is that instead of adding and more about choosing, you’re developing your ability to choose. So, that ability to make decisions and figure out what to keep and what to throw away is the thing that’s really improving your skills here. Over time, you’ll find that you’ll get better at making those choices and it won’t feel as random as it might feel right now.