Visual Logorrhea – On the Prevalence of Slideuments

Abstract

Recent lit­er­a­ture on pre­sen­ta­tion design advo­cates high­ly visu­al slides avoid­ing a lot of text. Read­ing and lis­ten­ing at the same time is assumed to be impos­si­ble; long bul­let­ed lists of text are thought to be dis­tract­ing from the speech and there­fore to be avoid­ed. Although the cri­tique of so-called “slideu­ments” is ubiq­ui­tous, there is lit­tle to no quan­ti­ta­tive research on their preva­lence in pre­sen­ta­tion design. In order to close this gap, almost 1,500 ran­dom pre­sen­ta­tions freely avail­able on the inter­net have been exam­ined. Besides the analy­sis of the tex­tu­al con­tent (i.e. word and line counts) that forms the pri­ma­ry basis of this pub­li­ca­tion, font and lay­out have also been ana­lyzed. The results have been com­pared with dif­fer­ent advice on pre­sen­ta­tion design found in a selec­tion of wide­ly known sources.

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