Posts Tagged ‘whitespace’

Present like Yoda you can

When we were in school we learned to fill up our exams until we were out of space; it was frowned upon to hand in an essay that didn’t fill up the whole page. Most of us learned the trick: To write more, studying the same, you had to learn how to say the same thing in 3 different ways. And this is how we got used to filling up all available empty space. Don’t kid yourselves, the education system has been training us for this, a lot of exams when you’re young ask you to fill in a gap or complete the blanks. By the time we graduate we are experts at filling up empty space.

But, as it turns out, filling up empty space is not a good thing. In presentations, whitespace helps us reinforce our message and design better slides (read my post on whitespace here). Now that we don’t have to answer exams or write 10 page essays, we find ourselves filling up whitespace compulsively. In presentations you can see it in the use of clipart (tiny image that doesn’t contribute anything to your message, but that makes its way into 70% of presentations, merely because we have empty space). The most effective approach, however, is to learn to use whitespace to our benefit.

One of Yoda’s lessons is: “You must unlearn what you have learned”. Totally true! After 18 years learning to fill up empty space, we have to unlearn what we have learned and start to appreciate it. Instead of slides like this:

Learn how to get rid of what you don’t need, keep only what is needed to communicate your message and make something like this:

Until next time,

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.

Thursday, 17 February 2011 16:43 Written by Byron Stanford 3 Comments

Whitespace

In the war of clarity against clutter, whitespace is your greatest ally. For some reason we tend to believe that empty space is a bad thing: we redundantly repeat things answering exams to fill up that dreaded white piece of paper, we fill out all our social media’s statuses, use up all the available characters allowed on an SMS… We have a compulsion to fill up all that empty space. You can easily see that people have the same problem when they create a presentation. Look at all those slideshows with rivers of bullet points, clipart, footers… Having a slideshow without whitespace is, for your audience, like trying to give your whole presentation without stopping for a breath.

All this clutter confuses our brain and doesn’t allow us to focus on the message. If you want to communicate information you need to make your message clear so that people can follow. Going against this compulsion of filling up all empty space can be difficult. It is usually more difficult to be clear, succinct and concise than it is to blabber about. We have to learn to get rid of the unnecessary noise and keep only the core elements of our message. Then represent them on a slide. Don’t be afraid of empty space, it lets the eye rest and draws more attention to what it’s surrounding. Use slides with plenty of whitespace around the important elements, the eye will quickly grab focus of it and the brain will know it is important. The whitespace around an element or a word is like a frame for the mind which makes it stand out more and have bigger impact.

Try it in your next presentation and let me know how it goes.

Until next time,

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.