The eternal slide design tradeoff: are slides visual cues to guide a real talk, where the talk is the point? Or are they a written document to act as a leave-behind, that people can read and understand later?

The answer is clearly "yes"

Apple-style slides are notorious for being 2-3 words and a really fancy graphic. It makes for wonderful 'visual storytelling' but if you just got the slides after the keynote, and didn't get the video, you'd be totally lost other than "OK they talked about these topics"

Consulting company-style slides are also notorious for being 20 page white papers masquerading as a slide deck. Dense bullets, tables, details. Awful for visual storytelling, but great for emailing around when you weren't in the room

my hypothesis is that for most slide decks, the "in the room" audience is 20% and the "email recipient audience" is 80%. Exceptions are possibly just keynotes & decision briefs, although there are probably others

this might qualify as the most boring twitter thread I've ever done (how to make slides) but some of us may as well study the topic and try to get good, considering how much time it consumes, and how key it is to basic business communication

check out this slide (Apple Keynote) it's so minimal it doesn't even have a freaking border

now checkout this slide (THIS IS A REAL EXAMPLE)

This style should be called "maximalist"

Background on this famously poor powerpoint slide: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html

Now ask yourself: which one would you rather see if you were sitting in the audience? Which one would you rather get in an email, if it were your job to understand the topic thoroughly?

lol @ Apple that keynote slide doesn't even say which product they're talking about

lol @ the department of defense "a picture is worth a thousand words" wasn't meant to be taken literally, you weren't supposed to put the 1000 words into the picture