To fully understand the rules that govern just how much information you can include in your presentation slides, you need to appreciate a fundamental of human nature namely, that we have an innate desire to be The First to Know.
Unfortunately, most of the presentation visuals that we see are designed with the mistaken belief that audiences will actually wait for the presenter to walk them through them. Wrong.
When the technology of communications was slower, we took a more historical approach to news – news was about what happened. We were accustomed to waiting for the news, and news had a time: Did you see the morning paper? Did you hear the evening news?
But with electronic advancements, we came to think of news more in terms of what is happening at the moment. Film brought us motion, but video feeds brought us there. Screens eclipsed paper as the preferred venue for getting the latest. Newspapers folded, first afternoon editions and then even icons of Americana – think Herald Tribune. Instead of being the first source of news in the world, to survive newspapers became more feature oriented providing value only for less perishable and less...