Fight For Your Right to Simplify: How We Edit Down Presentations

Do slides filled with bullet points make you flinch? Does unattractive design and clip art give you a terrible feeling in the pit of your stomach? And finally, does the sight of overused jargon like “synergy” make you see red and want to edit?

If you’re a minimalist, you wage a battle against corporate content every day. Against team members who don’t understand your perspective, don’t prioritize design, and don’t see the reason why everything their presentation can’t fit into five slides or less.

We salute you, soldiers of simplicity.

Let us share the wisdom we have gathered while working with clients who are stuck in the old-school mindset of presentations or other content projects. Here’s a fictional example based on a real-life client case study to help you understand what we mean. Picture in your mind a healthcare company with locations across the US called HealthyBright. They give a lot of presentations a year to industry leaders about their latest innovations in the medical field.

The problem is that the HealthyBright management team loves their content. They love nothing more than seeing four charts on a single slide or a bullet point list that stretches from the North to South Pole. Going into the project, we know that their content would be vastly improved with some editing. Then there would be more room for design as well as a focus on what actually matters within their presentations.

Fight For Your Right to Simplify: How We Edit Down Presentations

How do we get HealthyBright to agree with our vision?

It all starts by showing them what could be. If you have a difficult client or work for a difficult company that doubts your overall vision, provide them with a Draft 1 of what you’re thinking. We find that it helps if the client is able to see what you mean in action, rather than just relying on a high-level conversation about a direction that makes them nervous.

The next stage is to prove that their content, all million words of it, is being respected. Instead of deleting everything, we put their existing words into the speaker’s notes of the appropriate slides, or even in a separate one-sheet that will be given out after the presentation for additional context. Think of that handout as an appendix with all of the technical information the audience may need. This offers them a way to see that their beloved content still exists and is in use, but provided in a much more appropriate way than on a cramped, illegible slide in size 8 font.

The beauty of a perfect compromise.

Finally, the best way to make a client who fears minimal content happy is to compromise. If there are stats that need to be put back into the presentation, we find a way to incorporate them back into the deck. We either stretch out the number of slides to accommodate the information, or we make room within the existing storyboard. Compromise can be a good thing, just so long as the potential client can see what the presentation looks like both “their way” and “our way.”

Want to read more about simplifying presentations and cutting out unnecessary content? Check out these related articles from our archives!

The Complete Guide to Editing Presentation Content

Kickstart Your Presentation Content Edits in 3 Steps

Presentation Writing From the Ground Up


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