So Your CFP Was Accepted

1150 words | Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Introduction

Following on from the post last week on putting together a decent Call for Proposal let’s go through some things to bear in mind when putting together your slides - roughly in order of importance.

Give yourself enough time to prepare

Before the actual conference, you should have planned enough to have given yourself enough time to have run through your talk multiple times with a few different dry runs.

Be ready to do your first dry run (that isn’t just presenting to someone other than yourself) about 2 weeks prior to the conference taking place. That gives you plenty of time to ensure that your timing is good, and also incorporate feedback from those helping you to improve your talk.

By doing multiple dry runs with a varied audience, you’ll get a good range of feedback (not that you have to take every single bit of it into account!). Sometimes after looking at something for so long you’re too close to notice how something sounds/may come across, or those typos you’ve made/image you’ve cropped weirdly. By presenting to others before the day of, your slides are going to be much more polished than if you wrote and gave the talk without anyone else having seen it.

Animate your slides

Talking of bullet points - for each slide, animate them so that they appear one at a time. This will do two things for you:

• Help your pacing so that you’re talking about one thing at a time without each point blending into the next
• Stop people from switching their focus from you talking to reading what’s on the slides

Use short(er) sentences for bullet points

No one likes death by PowerPoint. Especially if each slide is a wall of text. Try and keep bullet points as short as possible. Ideally they should give you enough to riff off of with practice of your talk so that you’re not reading directly off the slides.

Don’t give your life story

At the start of one than one talk on the classic “whoami” slide, I’ve seen essentially a slide full of bullet points that goes into a lot of detail on personal background, how they got to where they were etc. I’m not saying it isn’t interesting to know about or that others won’t want to know (and no doubt it may well come up chatting to people after your talk), but you’ve got 20/30/45 (or more) minutes - spending a full 2 of them on talking about yourself isn’t really needed.

A couple of bullet points with what you do for a day job, where you’re from, and anything else legitimately interesting is plenty.

Most importantly, the organisers chose your talk for a reason - the audience will trust that you know what you’re talking about for the topic of your talk. You don’t need to use the slide about yourself to justify why you’re up there giving your talk.

Make the font bigger than you think necessary

Unless it’s an incredibly small venue, be mindful of the people towards the middle and the back who aren’t going to be able to see the screen as easily as those at the very front. Take the font size you think you should use, double it, and then add a few more font point sizes to it. If it starts with a 3 (e.g. 36), you’re probably in the right ballpark.

This is something I tend to do the morning of once I’m at the venue. On more than one occasion, I’ve realised that the screen I’ll be presenting on is a good bit bigger than expected.

A picture (really) is worth a thousand words

Everyone learns in different ways - some are fine absorbing text, for some, things click better with pictures. By mixing up how you get your points across, you’ll also have a better chance of keeping your audience engaged throughout the entire talk. Try and vary the content of your slides so that not every single one contains text alone.

Add some humour

Whether it’s a joke or a meme, by putting some humour in your presentation (like animating your slides!) is also going to help keep people’s attention and make your talk more memorable.

Avoid pictures of code

Along the same lines as don’t make your slides a long list of bullets that look like a wall of text - avoid pictures of large chunks of code. If you need to show code, considering breaking it down into manageable chunks step by step over multiple slides. Like before, it’ll help with pacing, but it also won’t make some of your audience want to gouge their eyes out.

Don’t goad the demo gods

If you’re going to include a demo and you want to do it live, make sure you’ve also recorded the demo in case things don’t work out! It’s no fun watching someone panic when things aren’t going to plan, getting more and more flustered because they didn’t account for internet being spotty, worrying that they’ve got 21 minutes of their talk left and 34 more slides to go.

Do yourself a favour and take a lot of pressure and worry off of yourself. If something goes wrong with doing it live, you can simply move onto the next slide and pick up where you left off with minimal fuss.

Close all other applications

Save yourself and attendees the hassle of splitting attention or being distracted by a random notification that has popped up somewhere else on the screen. Before starting your talk, close all your Slack/Teams/email/whatever client and make sure that the only things open are things that you absolutely need to give your talk.

Check your browser history and bookmarks

If your talk (demo, most likely) involves a web browser, then take 10 minutes before recording your demo (which you really should do!) and make sure that there’s nothing inappropriate showing up in your recently visited website on a new tab page, nothing that is sensitive in your bookmarks bar, and nothing weird that would show up in your search suggestions. Repeat the process the day before (or morning of) giving your talk.

This above is doubly important if your talk is being recorded. Save yourself the embarrassment of an awkward situation being immortalised on the internet.

Consider using a presenter remote

It’s quite likely that someone at the conference already has one you can borrow if you don’t want to buy your own, but having a presenter remote handy can be great for making sure that you aren’t tethered to your laptop because you need to change slides.

By being able to walk away from where your laptop is you can move around a bit, engage your audience more so that it doesn’t feel like a lecture they were in during their university years, and quickly move between slides without mashing your keyboard.

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