If you want to make better slide decks forget all of this, pick a readable typeface, a title weight and a content weight, and move on to the real meat:
Your guiding light is the rule of 7 +/- 2. That is the model of your audience's short term memory. It's how many things they can keep track of at any given moment. If you overflow 7 +/- 2, your audience will not follow. Also be wary of recency. If you haven't mentioned something in a while you may need to bring it back up again to keep it on top of that stack.
Next: one slide, one statement. Ideally it should be in the title of the slide. If you need more than a few bullet points and a figure to elaborate, it's too busy.
Lastly: your slides are props. They do not need to be "complete" in their coverage. They are props for you to use while you give the REAL presentation which is in the medium of spoken word. If your slides do not facilitate understanding of your speech, or worse if they hinder it or distract from it, your slides suck. At the same time, avoid the trap of single bold word slides that give no guidance. Your slides are the map, your speech is the territory. Both matter.
P.S. As a rule of thumb any sentence that needs to wrap around to a second line deserves scrutiny. Always ask "could this have been a diagram?". Running examples, especially coupled with good illustration, are also excellent.
If you want to make better slide decks forget all of this, pick a readable typeface, a title weight and a content weight, and move on to the real meat:
Your guiding light is the rule of 7 +/- 2. That is the model of your audience's short term memory. It's how many things they can keep track of at any given moment. If you overflow 7 +/- 2, your audience will not follow. Also be wary of recency. If you haven't mentioned something in a while you may need to bring it back up again to keep it on top of that stack.
Next: one slide, one statement. Ideally it should be in the title of the slide. If you need more than a few bullet points and a figure to elaborate, it's too busy.
Lastly: your slides are props. They do not need to be "complete" in their coverage. They are props for you to use while you give the REAL presentation which is in the medium of spoken word. If your slides do not facilitate understanding of your speech, or worse if they hinder it or distract from it, your slides suck. At the same time, avoid the trap of single bold word slides that give no guidance. Your slides are the map, your speech is the territory. Both matter.
P.S. As a rule of thumb any sentence that needs to wrap around to a second line deserves scrutiny. Always ask "could this have been a diagram?". Running examples, especially coupled with good illustration, are also excellent.