The Zen of Presentations, Part 71: Slides per minute

In grad school, I was introduced to a nice, simple rule for giving a talk.

One slide per minute.

I used this rule for a long time. It seemed to work well. In particular, any slide with data seemed to take at least a minute to digest. You had to orient yourself to the axis labels, the units, there is reader an interpretation to do, and that takes a little time.

I did know it was a rule of thumb, not an ironclad rule. I would estimate a slide would be up for a little less than a minute when it was a picture of an animal or something else that had no data or nothing to read.

But then I saw Lawrence Lessig’s presentation, “Free culture” (via Garr Reynolds’s blog). His talk had 243 slides, but it was not 243 minutes. Lessig used his slides in a way I’d never seen before. They weren’t illustrations to be described or explained. His slides were his rhythm section, laying out a beat and emphasizing what he said. Even though his slides were up for such a short time, I never felt confused or lost or thinking, “Wait, wait, go back!”

I was blown away. I showed me how limited my views about what a “good presentation” were.

Then I learned about formats like pecha kucha and Ignite talks. Like Lessig, they emphasized quick pacing, running through slides at 3 to 4 per minutes. And those talks often rocked.

The key to such rapid fire delivery was planning and practice. The automatic slide advance rule for pecha kucha and Ignite talks forced to you plan and practice relentlessly. Practice never leads you wrong.

There are some images and slides that probably do warrant a full minute. But the audience can often pick up on points faster than you’d think.

There isn’t any magic number of slides in a talk. Your talk can have hundreds of slides. Your talk can have no slides. Or your talk can even have one slide per minute.

Update, 3 December 2021: Lawrence Lessig’s free culture talk was originally presented as a Flash animation, which is mostly dead now.

Here it is, in parts, on YouTube: Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3.

Related posts

The Zen of Presentations, Part 40: Lighting a fire under speakers

How Gilmore Girls change my teaching

External links

Free culture presentation
The “Lessig method” of presentation