A key thing to remember, is that there’s no good reason to overfill your slides with content. Instead, split it out across several slides. This will help you pace your presentation and make it easier for the audience to follow along with you. If you want to draw attention to a particular object, make sure not to crowd it. Use whitespace to show the audience what you want them to look at! Give it room to breathe and make it the centrepiece.
This can be a useful tool when presenting data. In this example the graph is squashed in and the data isn’t easy to read.
Presentation slide with a small graph on phone code for ecuador one side and a large chunk of explanatory text on the other.
But in the slide below, that graph is given lots of lovely space to itself, making it the main focus and allowing the audience to actually interpret it – the rest of the text can be moved to a different slide or, even better, to the speaker notes.
Presentation slide with a graph taking up most of the space. A couple of key data points are labelled and there is a takeaway in a text box.
For more tips on minimalist presentation design, check out this blog post on how to keep your slides simple and clean.
Paying attention to whitespace doesn’t only apply when you’re thinking about graphic elements, it’s something you should consider when playing with text and typography too. If you’re developing something more text heavy than a presentation, such as an article, a handout, or training – then intentional use of whitespace can make text easier to digest.
People tend to just skim a block of text that has no internal spacing – so if you lay it out like this, no one’s going to read it properly, and all your hard work will have gone to waste.