Thinking in Slides

When I’m struggling with a design problem, I sometimes create a presentation for it. I do this whether I intend to give the presentation or not. There’s something about the process of breaking my thoughts out into slides and thinking about how I would explain it to an audience that forces me to clarify my thinking. It’s easier to spot places where the logic doesn’t hold up. The constraints of limited space on each slide and the scenario of a hypothetical presentation force me to tighten up the ideas and how I express them.

It’s some work to create presentations that I never intend to give, but I’ve found that if I go to the trouble of thinking through the presentation, I am better prepared than anyone else in the room when the subject comes up in conversation. Have you ever met someone who seemed to have a thoughtful, detailed answer to every question? They used to mystify me. I’ve since realized that those people usually don’t have anything special that I lack—they’ve just read and thought more about the subject than I have. They’ve done the work required to have an opinion. Thinking in presentations is one way that I personally like to do the work required to have an opinion.

A text outline can be enough to get you started. I don’t always design the presentations but sometimes playing with visual hierarchy and layout, or the process of creating or selecting imagery, forces you to think differently and inspires a thought you couldn’t have arrived at any other way.

Next time you’re struggling with your design work and feel like it’s not working conceptually, or if you have no idea how to explain a decision that you arrived at instinctively, trying putting together a presentation. Start with a text outline. It will help you clarify your opinions by forcing you to think about how you’d explain them to an audience. And when the time comes to discuss your work with stakeholders, you’ll find that it’s easier to talk about your design decisions because you’re the one in the room who has done the work required to have an opinion.