Presentation genre: Public company presentations to analysts - Consistency (3/4)

A well constructed presentation demonstrating attention to detail, consistency and precise placement of repetitive elements communicates professionalism, care and respect for the audience.

Consistency starts with colour, font, font size, placement and alignment of elements. Apart from visual consistency, elements such as language used e.g. UK or USA English, a comma or a point, handling of thousands, abbreviations etc. require defining. When unsure, use the option appearing first and apply throughout the deck.

If elements are not 100% aligned, they jump from one slide to the next. It is visually jarring and this ‘eye-flicker’ distracts and fatigues the audience.

The slides below are differentiated through colour coding, but the elements are 100% aligned and in exactly the same position progressing from one slide to the next for that particular layout.

'Eye-flicker' occurs most noticibly and commonly with tables in presentations where the placement, titles, column widths do not line up when advancing slides. This can be avoided by using placholders, grid spacing, grid lines and consistent text attributes.

The advantage of analyst presentation preparation is that they will happen at a predetermined date. Therefore, early preparation can be done where the entire template can be set-up, basic layouts defined, tables and graphs created and perfectly aligned with dummy figures, then replaced with actual values when available. Proper templates will allow material changes e.g. extra columns to be applied but maintaining the alignment integrity and correct placement of the element.

Sample content available in the public domain