Slides are visual aids. That is, they are visual, and they are aids.

Not any visual will be an aid. To get effective visuals you have to design them, that is, to plan and craft them to help your story.

In the Format menu of PowerPoint you get an option to set the Slide Design. While PowerPoint’s Slide Design is certainly a design, it is many times not what you actually need for your talk. Slide Design is only about the your slide’s graphic design, and it is not necessarily the one that will help your story.

That is not to say that graphic design is not important. It is important, especially that much of our sensors are dedicated to vision. In fact, we rely so much on vision to understand the world, that we use "to see" as a synonym for "to understand". Do you see my point?

Graphic design is important. A great book that will get you through the basic elements of graphic design is Alexander White’s The Elements of Graphic Design. Here is one of my favorite quotes from the book attributed to an anonymous source:

Design is not the abundance of simplicity. It is the absence of complexity.
- Anonymous

One particularly overlooked resource for graphic design is white space. Contrary to many expectations, white space is not a wasted space, and it is not necessarily white. White space is the space in between graphical objects that makes the objects get noticed.

Only when treated with the outmost respect will the white space reveal what is important. And only by seeing what is important will you see your story.

Advices on using white space in design appears over and over in different forms and in different areas. William Strunk Jr. advises us to omit needless words when designing our text. Edward Tufte advises us to minimize chart junk when designing our graphics.

As opposed to those advices, too often do the PowerPoint Slide Designs offer layouts that encourage you to fill the white space. And too often do presenters think of those Slide Designs as the only reasonable way to go.

Most of the slides I saw in presentations were slides with bullets. Truth be told I remember displaying such slides myself. Perhaps this phenomenon has something to do with the default slide layout in PowerPoint being named Bulleted List. The bulleted list layout splits the slide space into title space and bullets space. The bullets space is aligned top-left. How many times did you add just one bullet in this space? I bet it didn’t happen often. It would look odd. After all, bullets were invented to delimit several points.

To get another perspective on how slides can help you, take a look at Dick Hardt talking about Identity 2.0. This example renders the Slide Design completely useless, and uses white space as the only means of organization. Most of the time there is only one thing to look at, and because of that his voice stands out. And because the voice and the visuals are so well coordinated his story gets through.

(At the end of his presentation, you can notice a thank you note to Lawrance Lessig’s presentation style influence. You can read more about Lessig’s presentation style at Presentation Zen.)

Next time you work on your slides, ask yourself if the white space that you just filled does help your story. If it does not, do not hesitate to leave it white.

Fill the white space for a reason.