PowerPoint as wallpaper: slide rules that work on a big screen

By Alastair Greener, presenter of Present Yourself in a Minute · Updated 5 November 2026

The scientist Heinz Wolff is credited in the Present Yourself series with a line worth remembering: slides are the wallpaper, not the presentation. You are the presentation. The slides sit behind you and help people follow, and when they do more than that, the audience reads instead of listening. These rules keep the slides in their place, and they matter most on a big screen, where every mistake is ten feet tall.

Why a big screen changes things

On a laptop, a crowded slide is merely irritating. On a large screen or LED wall, the back row cannot read it, the front row has to look up at it, and you stand beside a very large wall of text. Small type, thin lines and low-contrast colours disappear. The room also sees the slide before it has heard you, so a dense slide wins the first few seconds of attention that you needed.

Alastair Greener's keynote "How To Get Your Voice Heard" frames the test: slides support your message and are never the message. If they could be handed out as a document and read without you, they are carrying too much.

The rules

Text

• Thirty point minimum. If it will not fit at 30 point, there are too many words on it.
• Left or right aligned, not centred. Centred paragraphs are harder to scan.
• One font. Mixing fonts looks untidy and adds nothing.
• Avoid capitals. A line in capitals is harder to read than the same line in normal case.
• Short lines. A phrase, not a paragraph. A single word is often enough.

Fonts

Choose a plain sans serif such as Arial or Calibri. Leave novelty fonts and serif fonts alone. Fine strokes get lost when a slide is projected or shown on a big panel, and decoration pulls attention to the type instead of the point.

Pictures

People remember pictures, posters and billboards more readily than text and spreadsheets. Think of the slide as a billboard: one image, one idea, perhaps one line. If you need to show figures, turn them into an infographic or a single large number.

Images you can use

Use your own photographs where you can. Never use other people's images without permission, and be wary of stock pictures that everyone has already seen. If you use stock, choose fresh images and avoid the clichés: the handshake, the lightbulb, the person pointing at a whiteboard. A design tool such as Canva makes it easy to produce clean graphics of your own.

Templates and logos

Ditch the default template. It tells the room you have not made any design decisions. Do not put your logo or your social media links on every slide either. One mention at the start and one at the end is plenty, and a logo in the corner of every slide is just more wallpaper on top of the wallpaper.

Colour and contrast

Strong contrast is the safest choice: dark text on a plain light background, or white text on a dark one. Avoid busy photographs behind words, thin pale lines and pairs of colours that sit close in tone. A bright projector in a lit room washes out subtle shades, so what looks elegant on your monitor can vanish on the wall. Use colour to point at one thing at a time, not to decorate.

Charts and numbers

A chart on a big screen should make one point. Remove gridlines, extra series and tiny labels, then label the line or bar directly. If the point is a single number, show only that number, large, and say the context aloud. Hand out the detailed table afterwards if people need it.

Use the screen to manage attention

Insert blank slides. When you want people to look at you, not the screen, put a black or plain slide in. It pulls focus back to you. It is also fine to have a blank screen for longer parts of the talk, such as a personal story.

Set up, transition, pause. When a new slide appears, people read it. Do not talk over it. Click, pause while they read, then speak. The STP method covers this in detail.

Face the audience. Use presenter view on your laptop so you can see your notes and the next slide without turning round. If you turn your back to read the screen, you lose the eye contact and your voice drops.

Know your slide numbers. In PowerPoint you can type a slide number and press Enter to jump to it. It is useful if a question takes you to a slide you hid or skipped.

Before the day

Slides that look fine on your laptop can fail on the venue screen. Check these before you present:

1. Run it on the venue screen. Check the text is readable from the back row, and the colours still work.
2. Check the shape of the screen. Ask the AV team whether it is widescreen or squarer. Slides built for the wrong shape get cropped or have bars.
3. Send your slides ahead. Keep a copy on a USB stick and in cloud storage as well, with your own laptop and adapters as the last backup.
4. Meet the AV team. Be a pleasure to work with: arrive early, be nice to the technicians and ask who will click your slides.
5. Rehearse with the real slides. Run the whole talk out loud, timing yourself with the slides, so you know when each one comes up.

If your talk will also be streamed or filmed, ask how the camera sees the slides. A slide that fills a wall may be tiny in a wide shot of the stage. Ask the production crew to show you the slides on the output the camera sees. Bigger type and fewer words is the usual fix. If the event needs vision mixing or a stream, event AV production covers what a crew sets up.

Build the slides last

Write the talk first, then add slides only where a picture or a number does a job that words cannot. Many speakers open the software first and let the template decide the talk. Reverse that. For each slide, ask what the audience would lose if it were removed. If the answer is nothing, delete it.

A worked example

Here is a slide that trips up many talks. It carries a title, seven bullet points of twelve words each, a small chart with eight coloured lines, the company logo and a footer with three social media handles. The type is 16 point, in capitals, centred. On a big screen nobody can read it, and the speaker ends up reading it aloud.

The fix runs in four steps:

1. Decide the one thing the slide must say. For example, "Customer complaints fell by half".
2. Replace the bullets with that sentence at 44 point, left aligned, in a plain sans serif.
3. Replace the chart with a single big number and a short label.
4. Remove the logo and footer. They can go on the first and last slides only.

Now the audience reads it in two seconds and looks back at you. What you say fills in the rest.

Common mistakes

• Reading the slide aloud word for word.
• Putting your whole script on the screen.
• Centred text in capitals.
• Three fonts and five colours.
• A default template with a stock photo of a handshake.
• Moving on to the next slide while still speaking about the last.
• Never testing on the real screen.

Check your pacing too: timing, words per minute and the 10/20/30/40 versions shows how to cut a talk down to fit its slot without adding slides.

Related guides

• Set up, Transition, Pause (STP)
• All guides and tools

The picture at the top of this page is an illustration, not a photograph of a client or a real job.