Seven rules for slides you can read from the back row

A slide isn’t a page. Nobody reads it at their own pace, sitting a foot away: people see it from a distance while someone is talking, and it disappears whenever that person decides. Everything that makes a page pleasant to read (paragraphs, nuance, footnotes) makes a slide unreadable.

These seven rules don’t take any design talent. Mostly, they take cutting things out.

1. One idea per slide

This is the rule all the others follow from. If a slide carries two ideas, the room reads the second one while you’re explaining the first, and ends up listening to neither.

Two ideas, two slides. That doesn’t make the presentation any longer: the speaking time is the same, and that’s what counts.

2. A title that says something

“Key figures” tells you nothing. “One customer in three comes back within a year” gets the point across, even to someone who only looked up for three seconds.

Write your titles as sentences: a subject, a verb, a piece of information. Keep them to one or two lines. A three-line title is a paragraph pretending to be a title.

3. Text big enough that there can’t be much of it

Pick a minimum size and stick to it: 24 points for body text, larger for titles. Below that, the back row can’t read it anymore, and on a computer screen shared over a video call, nobody can.

This constraint has a hidden benefit. At that size, a slide that keeps its margins holds barely more than thirty or forty words. If your text doesn’t fit, it isn’t the font size you should shrink. It’s the text.

Tip Step back ten feet from your screen, or shrink the slide down to the size of a postcard. Whatever you can no longer read, the room won’t read either.

4. Margins, and everything aligned

Nothing looks more thrown together than text crowding the edge or an image sitting slightly off the column. Generous margins and aligned edges, on the other hand, give an impression of care, even if no one could tell you why.

• Leave a real margin all the way around: at least a twentieth of the width.
• Align elements with each other: the same left edge for the title and the text, the same height for two images side by side.
• Keep the title in the same place from one slide to the next. If it jumps around, the eye notices every time the slide changes.

Empty space isn’t wasted space. It’s what tells the eye where to look.

5. Two sizes, one font, one accent color

Hierarchy comes from clear differences, not from piling on effects. A title that’s noticeably bigger than the text is enough. Three similar sizes, two fonts, bold, italics and underlining all cancel each other out.

For color, the safest recipe is also the simplest: one background, one text color and a single bright color, saved for what matters. If everything is in color, nothing is.

Watch the contrast. Light gray on white looks elegant on your screen and vanishes on a tired old projector. Web accessibility guidelines call for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for body text, which is a good benchmark for slides too.

6. Make the number big

A number buried in a sentence doesn’t stick. Pulled out of the sentence and shown very large, with one line underneath saying what it measures, it becomes the slide people remember.

With a table, ask yourself one question before you paste it in: which row do I want people to look at? Highlight that row, and pare back the rest. If every row matters, the table belongs in a document you send afterward, not on screen.

The same discipline applies to a chart: a single conclusion, written in the title, and the line or bar that proves it in your bright color.

7. An image should show, not decorate

A photo of a handshake or a light bulb adds nothing. It takes up the empty space, which was more useful.

An image earns its place when it shows what you’re talking about: the product, the place, the screenshot, the diagram. When it does, give it room. A full-slide image with one short sentence has more impact than the same image shrunk down next to five lines of text.

The layout does much of the work

Several of these rules (margins, alignment, sizes, where the title sits) shouldn’t depend on you staying vigilant. That’s what a layout is for: you choose what the slide carries, whether it’s a number, three steps or a quote, and the layout takes care of the rest.

That’s how Pimeli works: more than twenty layouts handle the margins and sizes for you, and the elements you move snap to the grid. What’s left are the rules nobody can apply for you: one idea per slide, and a title that says something.