How Easy Is This to Read?
Emphasis.
Keep presentation aids simple, so that they emphasize only what your speech emphasizes. Each aid should make only one point. Your listeners’ eyes should be drawn immediately to what you want to illustrate. The map of Yellowstone Park eliminates all information except what the speaker wishes to stress.
Had the speaker added pictures of bears to indicate grizzly habitat and drawings of fish to show trout streams, the presentation aid would have been more distracting than helpful. Avoid irrelevant cuteness! Graphics prepared for handouts may be more detailed than those used for posters, slides, or transparencies, but they should not contain extraneous material. When in doubt, leave the details out. Let your words provide the elaboration.
Balance.
Proper balance, as an important requirement for speech structure, is also important for visual materials. Your presentation aid should be balanced so that it is pleasing to the eye. The focal point of the aid can be the actual center of the chart or poster, or it can be deliberately placed off-center for the sake of variety.
You should have a margin of about two inches at the top and bottom of a flip chart or large poster board. On computer-generated graphics, you should leave blank space at both the top and the bottom. You should also have equal side margins. For poster boards and flip charts, these margins should be at least one and a half inches wide. On computer-generated graphics, they should be at least an inch wide.