Thomas Kejser's Database Blog

Very soon, it is conference time again, at SQLBits. As our team is preparing for this big event, I took a hard look at the slides we are using and the design we apply. While you may argue that spending time on slide design is a waste. I beg to differ. Using slides that are easily readable, beautiful and speak with clarity is important: No matter how great your content is, my experience shows that the audience will also judge you on the quality of the slide material you use. I will also assert that that most people are visual learners, so you owe it to your audience to use well designed slides. But even if you still disagree and if you don’t believe good slides help visual learners, consider this simple observation: if your slides look sloppy, it reflects on your character.

Case Study

To illustrate the process I went through, I will use an example slide. The slide below is for a great Microsoft presentation on column stores:

The first observation is that this slide makes some quite profound points (which I will delve into during SQLBits). The content is good. But the design is quite poor.

Some observations:

• The background colour looks murky
• The font used throughput (Segoe) is rather boring. Unfortunately, PowerPoint is quite fond of it (pun intended)
• There are at least 5 different font sizes in use on the slide. It looks messy
• Contrast is poor, the white text on yellow background is almost unreadable.
• The entire slide looks cramped – especially the illustration. Viewed from the back rows of the venue, the text will likely be unreadable
• Considering that this is from the SQL Server product group, the branding is non existent
• Headers and bullets are scattered almost randomly around the slide
• The compare between the two sides on left and right is not clear

Let’s try to improve this.

 

Improving Layout Contrast

First of all, let me apply a bright background and increase the contrast to make it more readable. Let me also clean up the inconsistent use of bullets and align the headers of each side of the slide. I will also use a colour scheme with much more contrast.

This is the first iteration:

I made some minor corrections in the header too – title casing and removing the load balancing (which is a very overloaded term).

 

Improving Content Contrast

The slide compares two different situations with each other – a before/after picture. This is a very powerful presentation method, and the creator of the slide has a great point here that I want to highlight. But, the contrast of the two sides is not clear from the layout. I want to make this contrast stand out.

In this second iteration of the slide, I increased the size of the two sub-headers (“Row Mode” and “Batch Mode”) to direct the reader’s attention to the fact that we are dealing with two different concepts. The two text lines below each illustration are also important points and I boldfaced them to make them stand out more.

In the slide, the differences in “probe input” and “build input” are also important. But the slide does not make the best use of this information. First of all, the left side uses the term: “Probe Input” while the right side uses the term “Probe Side” – even though they are the same concept. Second, the probe build/side text is located at the bottom of the illustration on the left side, and at the top on the right side. I moved them to the same location, the bottom of the slide, and made use the same text on both sides.

The slide now looks like this:

The contrast between the two sides is much clearer now don’t you think?

Notice that I did something which is typical of my slides: adding a footer with information. But as I was doing this, it made me reconsider this technique. Why is footer needed? If you are sitting in the room, chances are you probably KNOW which conference you are in – and knowing today’s date is not of much use. Putting information like that in the slide is just distraction for the precious attention of the audience, and a waste of slide space.

Having slide numbers is debatable. In favour of them, they make references to printed material easier. But it is a double edged sword, if you change your slides last minute (as I like to do) those references will be off.

 

Uncluttering and Cleaning up

The usage of fonts is far from optimal in the slide. Even after improving contrast, I doubt the slide will look good from a distance. And we want to reach those people hiding all the way at the back of the room too. Removing the footer also gives me more air on the slide to play with – allowing me to use bigger fonts.

Typographical rules dictate that one should reduce the number of fonts and font sizes in a work of graphical design. I decided to use Helvetica as my slide font and Calibri as the header.

Helvetica is the font of champions, it looks amazing both in print and on the screen. Arial is a discount version of Helvetica, don’t settle for it if you have Helvetica. For the slide text, I used only 16pt and 18pt sized font,  big enough to read from a distance. It will be clear soon why I chose Calibri for the header font, but for now, suffice to say that it is good that the header stands out in a different font than the main text.

The slide now looks like this:

Note how much larger the text is and how uncluttered it has become.

Trick: There is a little trick you can use when drawing images containing oval shapes. Notice how I managed to put a big, 16pt Helvetica “Thread" into the oval shape on the right? The default behavior of PowerPoint is to try and squeeze the text into a box that fits inside the shape. Like this:

This is probably NOT what you want. Instead, try disabling text wrapping like this in the Format Shape menu:

This gives you much more space inside the shape to fit in a larger font:

More readable text in the same space.

Branding

The slide is much more readable now, but it is not really clear that this slide comes from the SQL Server product group.

It would be tempting to slap a big Microsoft logo in there. But I think this leads to clutter. If you observe Apple’s branding , you will see that they use a very understated look. Yet, when you hold an Apple product in your hand, you are not in doubt who made it. I think we can use a similar principle of "cool minimalism" for the slides.

We need to give it that SQL Server feel, while maintaining a clean look. Let me take a look at some of the themes of SQL server. First of all, Microsoft uses the "wavy  logo" as seen to the right. I think that is rather cool and it looks high tech – the look I am after. But instead of slapping it directly on the slide, let us make it subtle, in the background image. Gray scaling the logo and putting it on a white background makes it discreet, without interrupting the contrast of the slide. Please don’t use high contrast background pictures, they really annoy the eyes.

Another thing to note is that the SQL Server logo is typically written like this:

I tried identifying the font, and I think it is Calibri in bold (The big “Q” gives it away). Changing the headers to this font gives it that familiar look we are after, without doing the obvious thing of adding a logo directly.

With a new, discreet background and a matching header font, I can create this minimalist branding:

 

Notice that I  also added arrows to show the important transition between the row and batch side of the comparison. It gives the slide some “movement” (and I will animate it). The additional space at the bottom made available by the redesign really highlight the important parts of the slide.

Summary

In this blog I have walked you through some simple design improvements of a single slide. I spend 2-3 hours doing this, but I think the result is well worth the time. Let us compare the before/after picture:

Even at a scale fitted to this blog, the readability improvements should be obvious.

The new layout have been saved as a template that we can use in the team to get a consistent look. Hopefully, SQLBits will have our prettiest slides yet, as well as our best content.

This week, I presented at the InsightOut conference in Tokyo, Japan. The experience has been amazing. I met a lot of interesting people from different database platforms. I would like to share some lessons I learned from presenting to an audience that does not speak my language.

The conference was mostly targeted at a Japanese participants, and that meant I had to use synchronous translators. It is only the second time I have done this – and doing it three more presentations like this really taught me something about my own presentation style. Hearing your own words translated, even when you cannot understand them, helps you understand a lot about the pace you speak, and how clear your points are.

Another major learning was my use of slides. As I carefully explained my slides to prepare the translators for the session, I discovered things that would confuse my audience, even the ones that speak my language.

Here are the lessons I took away (and some general observations about presentations)

Text on slides is just a distraction, get rid of it: The translators have to translate BOTH the text and your words. This makes it extremely hard for the audience to keep track of your points.

Furthermore, going over the slide text with the translators before the session made me reflect on that fact that text really is redundant or should be kept to very small sentences. If you have anything to say: say it, don’t write it.

Avoid the use of vendor specific acronyms: I presented to both SQL Server, Oracle and PostgreSQL people. You are not doing yourself any favours by using acronyms like: PDW (Parallel Data Warehouse), RG (Resource Governor) and FT (Fast Track)

This may work for an “in-crowd” – but it will not work for a new audience unfamiliar with your terminology. Hearing the translator say the acronym in English, in the middle of a Japanese sentence, sticks out like a sore thumb.

If you are stuffing your slides with acronyms, you are also making it hard for people to share the slide deck with others.

Always annotate graphs: When people look at a graph, they should be able to immediately understand what the axes represent. Use your spoken words to describe what the MEANING of the data is, not WHAT the data it is. If you say: “What you are looking at here is…” – you already made a mistake. For example, take the illustration below, a real example from my deck. The graphs lacks both horizontal and vertical axis information. These omissions makes decoding the information difficult, and makes the translator’s job harder. It also makes it nearly impossible to share the slides with others.

Pictures REALLY matter: A picture is worth much more than a thousand words to an international audience. No matter where you are from – you can “read” a picture. Since visual input is the preferred learning method for most people, pictures make your points much clearer.

In fact, I think it is well worth the time to replace text with good pictures whenever possible.

Pointing with your finger (or laser pointer) does not require translation: Using pictures instead of text, allowed me to illustrate complex problems with less chance of getting things lost in translation.

Use tables, not text, for data points that cannot be shown in a graph: I tend to put data points in bullet form, in-lined with the text on the slides. This is wrong. Mixing numbers and text makes for a VERY poor translations, and also decreases readability.

Take this poor slide (my own) as an example. This is just wrong:

A much better way to represent the same information is:

By the way, use alternating colours on the table rows – it makes them easier to read.

If it does not look good in gray scale, change the colour scheme: I saw a lot of people carrying printed slides to the session (including my translators). Many printouts where in black and white. For an audience that tries to prepare themselves by reading slide before they show up, you should respect them by making sure the slides look good in gray scale.

Below is a real example of a slide I used, along with how it looks when printed in black and white:

The Original Slide	The printed version

Clearly, important information is lost here!

Write compression rates as 1:X instead of Y%. What does it mean that you get 10% compression? Does it mean that the data shrinks by 10% or that the data is 10% of the original size?

If I write 10:1, it is unambiguous that the data becomes 10 times smaller.

Be consistent in your choice of colours: If you use one colour to illustrate a concept, keep using that colour for the same concept throughout the presentation.

Here is an example: I used this slide to illustrate distributed vs. replicated tables in Parallel Data Warehouse:

The red tables are replicated, the green one is distributed. Five slides later, in the same deck, I used this slide:

Now, the red table is distributed, and the purple table is replicated. Clearly, I am not doing my audience any favours.

Use white backgrounds and high contrast imagines for your slides: Similar argument as the above guidance: printing a black background slide looks horrible. A high contrast colour scheme (black text on white background) makes it easier for people in the back of the room to read your slides.

Here is a real example that I made the mistake of using:

The original slide	A printed, blurred version

Summary

Here are my takeaways to implement in my future presentations. I will:

• Stick to pictures and short sentences in every slide
• Make the slides “pointer friendly”
• Use high contrast, white background and simple slide layouts
• Use consistent colour schemes that look good in gray scale
• Carefully annotate graphs
• Use tables and graphs, instead of text, to illustrate points