Six Presentation Mistakes that Insult Your Audience and Destroy Your Credibility

There's an inherent relationship between a presenter and his/her audience.  The presenter hopes that the audience shows up (on time), with sincere interest in what the presenter has to say.  That's pretty obvious.  But the audience has expectations of their own.  They expect the presenter to show up practiced, prepared, and passionate.  They expect the presentation to be created with care, with obvious attention to detail paid to make sitting through the presentation as enjoyable as possible.

Unfortunately for the audience, not all presenters take the time to ensure they're delivering the highest quality presentations they can.  I realize there are certain circumstances that make creating an award-winning presentation difficult, with "time-constraints" being the most often used excuse...er...reason.  However, I feel that there are some errors and omissions that are simply inexcusable and when they show up in a presentation, the audience should rightfully feel insulted.  If nothing else, give your presentation a quick run-through to ensure none of these have reared their ugly heads.

Here are six presentation mistakes/snafus/faux-pas that when used for evil can destroy your credibility and even leave your audience feeling insulted:

1. Black font, white background, no images throughout the entire presentation
   This is the ultimate sign that a presenter has given up on their presentation, at least from a PowerPoint design perspective.  By default, PowerPoint presentations use a black font with a white background.  When this is used throughout the entire presentation, it is safe to assume that the presenter cares as minimally as possible about visually engaging the audience and is only using PowerPoint because someone held a gun to their head.
   
   
   EXAMPLE:
   
   
   Solution(s): Use a preset slide background (not to be confused with a template or theme).  Use full slide images (or any images).  Reduce the amount of text and practice.  Care.  Lot's of options. 


2. Watermarks on stock imagery
   Purchasing stock imagery is a common method to make a presentation more visual.  A common practice is to "download a comp", which is a free copy of the image.  These comps come with "watermarks" on them, which is some form of shape or logo that would basically render the image unusable except for testing in designs.  Some of these are quite faint, however, and are often forgotten about by the designer and possibly missed during dry runs of the presentation.  Make sure you purchase all your watermarked images and replace the comps, otherwise you'll either seem too cheap to buy the image or too lazy to proof your presentation.
   
   
   EXAMPLE:
   
    
   
   Solution:  Proof your presentation.  Then ask a colleague or friend to proof it as well, not only for watermarks but spelling mistakes and a variety of other errors.


3. Improperly re-sized images (stretched/squished or pixelated)
   Images have a specific size.  Thus, when you resize an image to make it larger or smaller, you must ensure that the dimensions remain in proportion.  Not only that, but the image must have a large enough original size to avoid pixellation.  Often presenters grab images off Google or the like and they are small on the screen.  Instead of finding a larger image, they simply increase the size of the image on the slide, making the image blurry and pixelated.  This can even result in an image being undecipherable.
   
   
   EXAMPLE:
   
   
   Solution: When purchasing and/or downloading an image, ensure that the dimensions are large enough to suite your needs.  When I purchase an image off of iStock, I always choose at least the "Small" which usually starts at around 700-800px.  To resize an image properly, hold the SHIFT key and drag the corner of the image.  This will lock the dimensions in place so the image remains in proper proportion.


4. Not knowing what a slide means
   There's nothing that says "I don't know what the heck I'm talking about so don't take me seriously" like a presenter who looks at a slide and clearly has no idea what it means.  This happens often with slides that have a single image, or graphs/charts, or pretty much any slide that doesn't spell out exactly what the point is.  You may think this is so obvious that I didn't need to list it, but it's happened to me (as a designer).  It made me sick to my stomach watching the presenter stare at the slide, pause for a few agonizing seconds, proclaim he didn't know what the slide meant, and then blamed me, personally, by name.  Regardless, he made it clear that he didn't care enough about the presentation to run through the slides, even once.  If you don't care, why should your audience?
   
   Solution:  Practice.


5. Animation, and lots of it
   I find nearly all of the animation options in PowerPoint to be criminal.  The only animations I use in my presentations are Fade and Wipe.  I use Fades pretty much exclusively, both for between-slide animations and with items on the slide.  I use Wipe (for objects) when I want something to seem as if it's moving, but these are few and far between, at least on a personal level. 
   
   I simply see no value in star wipes, random bars, spinners, boomerang, and light speed, just to name a few.  Your slides act as a visual backdrop, amplifying your message.  These animations only startle the audience and, in my honest opinion, make a presentation look amateurish.  It's the equivalent of designing a beautiful wedding dress and then Bedazzling it.
   
   Solution: Unless using a specific transition like Push Down or Push Left to simulate movement across a larger space, stick with one simple transition throughout your presentation.  Again, my preference is Fade for both slide transitions.  As for items on your slide, stick with Fade or Wipe, and try to keep it consistent throughout the presentation.


6. Clip-Art
   With the popularity of low-cost stock imagery sites like iStockPhoto and user contributed photo sites like Flickr (as long as you respect the image's copyright license), Clip-Art is a thing of the past.  I'm honestly stunned that they still offer Clip-Art.  It's like walking into a music store and finding no CD's, only cassette tapes.  Sure, I used to rock cassettes in my '87 Honda Accord LXi (hatchback baby), but I've moved on.  Clip-Art made sense when our computers had limited memory to hold images, but the size of a common computer can easily hold more up-to-date images.  Image searching can be a time consuming process, but if you care enough about your presentation, you'll dedicate the appropriate time (and your audience will thank you).
   
   
   EXAMPLE:
   
   
   Solution: If you want to make your presentation look like you dreamed it up in '83, use Clip-Art.  Otherwise, take a look at the sites I previously mentioned.

What aspects of a presentation make you cringe?  What could you add to this list?

Comments

[clearED]

Great list there, and I totally agree about all of them.

As for my favorite? I think that people who use images with the watermark still on them are the most amazing of all... In what world do you think that it is ok to do that? From both a visual and legal standpoint!

Keep up the great work.

Ed

[Mister Thorne]

Another thing that some folks like to do is to put too much text on a slide. The text is downsized to get it all to fit, and then people in the back of the room can't read any of it, which makes the slides useless.

My recommendation: if you don't know how to produce a slide show, have someone else do it for you.

[David E. Bowman]

Love the post. I once took a master's course that mandated the use of white text on black background in bulleted list & paragraph form for every slide. Hated every minute of it.

Here is a little song I wrote about bad powerpoint.
http://www.davidebowman.com/death-by-powerpoint.htm

[Jonathan Thomas]

Thanks Ed. I can understand when you just forget and the image may be small and the watermark barely noticeable...but I've seen some huge images with blatant watermarks. Unreal.

Thanks for reading!

[Jonathan Thomas]

I've actually have a client tell me that he wanted me to make a graph so small that it's undecipherable, in order to ensure that the viewer doesn't stare at the graph and instead listens to the presenter. I was speechless.

And I can't argue with your recommendation ;)

[Jonathan Thomas]

Wow David...I thought you were kidding about the song, but I was wrong! You totally rocked it. I'm very impressed.

I had a professor in grad school who used a mustard-yellow background and mountains of black text on the screen. One person actually asked him why he chose that horrendous color, and he said "Because it's so ugly, it gets my students' attention." I certainly was paying attention, although my attention was trained on trying not to be sick.

[Sales Training]

Entertaining and yet so true! Loved this article! Will pass it on!

[Jonathan Thomas]

Thanks. I appreciate it!

[Fred E. Miller]

Jon:

Good points!

I'm going to have to go back and replace some of the clipart in presentations.

You are correct!

Thanks!

[Coach4presentg]

Great article, so true, I see examples of many of these 'presentation mistakes' every week when training

[Planetedgar.blogspot.com]

I'd like to add another one - people who read the text on the slide, word for word, then add a couple words afterward. Hey, genius, I learned how to read when I was 4. It's OK to read one or two lines for emphasis, but don't just read the slides and that's all. If you do, you forefit the right to be mad at me for snoring.

J

[Jonathan Thomas]

@Fred E. Miller - Thanks for reading! Let me know if you need help searching for new images.

@Coach4Presentg - It's unfortunate but these mistakes happen all the time. Thank God society takes driving more seriously than presenting or we'd be in a real mess.

@PlanetEdgar - The best way to prevent this from happening is to prepare appropriately and reduce the amount of text on the slides, but often what you point out is the case. Sometimes they don't even add a couple words after!