When slides are filled with text, they compete with the spoken words, and this actually leads to a decreased retention of the content. Instead, slides are better to be visual to complement the spoken words with images that reinforce the message of the presentation.

However, this does not mean that all text is bad. For example, most slides of Larry Lessig contain only text and yet his presentations are far from boring. His method is to put one or two words per slide. These words do not mean much by themselves, but when they are perfectly synchronized with Larry Lessig’s speech the result is quite impressive. Watch his TED talk to get an idea.

While this is an interesting approach, I wanted to explore more the visual potential of text. One result is the set of slides below on the topic of delivering presentations.

I used only text to build these slides, and I wanted each of these slides to convey one meaningful idea. Of course, it i€™s not quite only text, but instead I played with its visual characteristics like font, position, size, orientation or color to reinforce the meaning of the message.

I let you decide if I succeeded or not. In case you think it is worth it, you can also vote for this slideshow in the Slideshare 2008 presentations contest. To do that you have to login on Slideshare, and then press the thumb up icon.