The spoof: Paul Scheer’s (faux) TED Talk
Created by: Team Coco
The lesson: Don’t fall victim to idea sprawl.

Paul Scheer loads up his talk with insights on everything from dreams to the appropriate dipping sauce for chicken wings. But wouldn’t it have been more effective if he’d shared one single, cohesive idea? This is what we tell speakers: Consider the idea you want to share with the world. And include only the essentials to pop that idea into focus.

The spoof: Onion Talks: Compost-Fueled Cars: Wouldn’t That Be Great?
Created by: The Onion
The lesson: Don’t share an idea you don’t believe in enough to follow through on.

In the inaugural episode of The Onion’s spoof series, a man shares an idea for cars that run on compost as if it were gas. Intriguing. Only, he says, “Feasibility deals with implementation—and I’m not involved with that.” This … isn’t good. When it comes to your big idea, you have to walk the walk as much as you talk the talk.

The spoof: Onion Talks: Ducks Go Quack, Chickens Go Cluck
Created by: The Onion
The lesson: Don’t bother sharing an idea that isn’t new.

Here, a man gives a talk about the noises made by your favorite barnyard animals. And while his Old MacDonald presentation style is compelling, his substance is nil. We look for ideas that surprise and change perceptions — whether it’s a talk that flips your thinking on a scientific phenomenon or one that makes you see something subtly different in your relationships.

The spoof: DED Talk: A TED Talk for Zombies
Created by: Official Comedy
The lesson: Beware of taking too sharp a left turn in your talk … and, please, only kill metaphorically.

This zombie’s talk is almost standing O–worthy. And then — there’s a twist that goes horribly wrong. While surprising talks are great, nothing should ever go this fully off the rails. A good talk takes the audience on a journey step by step. Also, literally killing the audience? Well, that’s no way to make sure your idea spreads. (That note also goes out to the speaker of Onion Talks: Stabbing Ignorance With Glass Ceiling Shards.)

The spoof: Patton Oswalt’s (fake) TED Talk
Created by: Team Coco
The lesson: Don’t let stern faces in the audience get you down.

At 1:08 in this talk, Patton Oswalt gets into a brawl with an audience member. Why? Because the guy in the audience had a sour expression on his face. The truth of talking to a big audience: not everyone will be engaged. So why focus on them? Instead, talk to the people who are clearly with you. Find a few friendly-looking people in different parts of the audience and speak to them as if they were old friends.

The spoof: Onion Talks: A Future Where All Robots Have Penises
Created by: Onion Talks
The lesson: Don’t rely on your demo.

This speaker shares the strange idea that household robots would catch on only if they had realistic genitalia; his talk goes all to hell when his robot malfunctions and falls off the stage onto an audience member. Of course, robots, animals, flying machines — they’re all a little unpredictable. So if your talk includes a demo, make sure you lay out the framework of your idea enough that you’re not fully betting on the unknown.

The spoof: High TED Talks
Created by: College Humor
The lesson: Neither mind-altering substance, nor the munchies, will help you feel more prepared to give your talk.

It’s completely natural to be nervous before speaking in public. (Watch the TED-Ed lesson “The Science of Stage Fright” to see how it isn’t so much a mental challenge to be overcome, as a physical reaction to be adapted to.) But walking onstage drunk or high, or overeating from the snack table backstage, is not how you conquer your nerves. The only way to fight the feeling: practice, practice, practice. Know your talk forwards and backwards to the point where the flow of words becomes second nature.

The spoof: Very Mary-Kate: SoHobo

Created by: College Humor
The lesson: Don’t do that thing where a bulleted list appears on your slides just as you say the very same words.

During a talk, the audience processes what they see on a slide and what they’re hearing in two separate channels. So if you type it in your slide, people aren’t fully paying attention when you say it. In general, we ask speakers to use as little text as possible on their slides, and to be especially wary of unnecessary bulleted lists. Our motto, which I just made up: Say it, don’t display it. (A sub-lesson for this spoof: Don’t steal ideas from Zoolander. As hilarious as this video is, “SoHobo” reminds us a bit of Derelicte.)

The spoof: Onion Talks: Loudness Equals Power
Created by: The Onion
The lessons: Don’t yell, and definitely don’t over-promise.

Every now and then, a speaker strides on the stage and uses a forceful tone that leaves the audience … disconcerted. The reason for the microphone: so you can talk normally, as if you’re having an engaged conversation with a friend. But this talk hits a bigger speed-bump when the speaker says of his invention, “In a few years, there’s no question [it] will transform our lives.” This kind of big promise just raises skepticism and smacks of inauthenticity. Keep promises realistic. Always.

Some other what-not-to-dos represented in these spoofs: don’t whisper, don’t nervously pace, watch the “jazz hands,” and don’t cling to your props for dear life. Don’t talk about your talk, introduce too much specialized vocabulary, fail to admit controversy, or paint a picture that’s either too utopian or too dystopian. And of course: Don’t offer up purely anecdotal evidence. You can read many more speaker tips in our comprehensive TEDx Speaker Guide (PDF).

1. Think about your slides last. Building your slides should be the tail end of developing your presentation. Think about your main message, structure its supporting points, practice it and time it—and then start thinking about your slides. The presentation needs to stand on its own; the slides are just something you layer over it to enhance the listener experience. Too often, I see slide decks that feel more like presenter notes, but I think it’s far more effective when the slides are for the audience to give them a visual experience that adds to the words.
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2. Create a consistent look and feel. In a good slide deck, each slide feels like part of the same story. That means using the same or related typography, colors and imagery across all your slides. Using pre-built master slides can be a good way to do that, but it can feel restrictive and lead to me-too decks. I like to create a few slides to hold sample graphic elements and type, then copy what I need from those slides as I go.
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3. Think about topic transitions. It can be easy to go too far in the direction of consistency, though. You don’t want each slide to look exactly the same. I like to create one style for the slides that are the meat of what I’m saying, and then another style for the transitions between topics. For example, if my general slides have a dark background with light text, I’ll try transition slides that have a light background with dark text. That way they feel like part of the same family, but the presentation has texture—and the audience gets a visual cue that we’re moving onto a new topic.
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4. With text, less is almost always more. One thing to avoid—slides with a lot of text, especially if it’s a repeat of what you’re saying out loud. It’s like if you give a paper handout in a meeting—everyone’s head goes down and they read, rather than staying heads-up and listening. If there are a lot of words on your slide, you’re asking your audience to split their attention between what they’re reading and what they’re hearing. That’s really hard for a brain to do, and it compromises the effectiveness of both your slide text and your spoken words. If you can’t avoid having text-y slides, try to progressively reveal text (like unveiling bullet points one by one) as you need it.
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5. Use photos that enhance meaning. I love using simple, punchy photos in presentations, because they help what you’re saying resonate in your audience’s mind without pulling their attention from your spoken words. Look for photos that (1) speak strongly to the concept you’re talking about and (2) aren’t compositionally complex. Your photo could be a metaphor or something more literal, but it should be clear why the audience is looking at it, and why it’s paired with what you’re saying. For example, I recently used the image above—a photo of a container ship about to tip over (it eventually sank)—to lead off a co-worker’s deck about failure preparation. And below is another example of a photo I used in a deck to talk about the launch of the new TED.com. The point I was making was that a launch isn’t the end of a project—it’s the beginning of something new. We’ll learn, adapt, change and grow.

And now some tactical tips…

1. Go easy on the effects and transitions. Keynote and Powerpoint come with a lot of effects and transitions. In my opinion, most of these don’t do much to enhance the audience experience. At worst, they subtly suggest that the content of your slides is so uninteresting that a page flip or droplet transition will snap the audience out of their lethargy. If you must use them, use the most subtle ones, and keep it consistent.
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2. Use masking to direct attention in images. If you want to point something out in a photo, you could use a big arrow. Or you could do what I call a dupe-and-mask. I do this a lot when showing new page designs, particularly when I don’t want the audience to see the whole design until I’m finished talking about individual components of it. Here’s the original image.Here’s the process for masking it. (1) Set the image transparency to something less than 100. (2) Duplicate that image so there is one directly over the top of the other. (3) Set the dup’d image transparency back to 100. and (4) Follow the technique here to mask the dup’d image. You’ll end up with something that looks like this.
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4. You can use this technique to call out anything you want in a screenshot. A single word, a photo, a section of content—whatever you want your audience to focus on.
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5. Try panning large images. Often, I want to show screen shot of an entire web page in my presentations. There’s a great Chrome extension to capture these—but these images are oftentimes much longer than the canvas size of the presentation. Rather than scaling the image to an illegible size, or cropping it, you can pan it vertically as you talk about it. In Keynote, this is done with a Move effect, which you can apply from an object’s action panel.
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6. For video, don’t use autoplay. It’s super easy to insert video in Keynote and Powerpoint—you just drag a Quicktime file onto the slide. And when you advance the deck to the slide with the video that autoplays, sometimes it can take a moment for the machine to actually start playing it. So often I’ve seen presenters click again in an attempt to start the video during this delay, causing the deck to go to the next slide. Instead, set the video to click to play. That way you have more predictable control over the video start time, and even select a poster frame to show before starting.
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7. Reproduce simple charts and graphs. Dropping an image of a chart into a presentation is fine, but it almost always disrupts the feel of a deck in unsightly fashion. If the graph data is simple enough (and you have some extra time) there’s a way to make it much more easy on the eyes. You could redraw it in the native presentation application. That sounds like needless work, and it might be for your purposes, but it can really make your presentation feel consistent and thought-through, of one flavor from soup to nuts. You’ll have control over colors, typography, and more. Here are some examples.
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Lastly, I’d love to leave you with a couple book recommendations. The first is Resonate, by Nancy Duarte. It’s not so much about slides, but about public speaking in general – which is the foundation for any presentation, regardless of how great your slides are. In it, she breaks down the anatomy of what makes a great presentation, how to establish a central message and structure your talk, and more. (One of her case studies comes from Benjamin Zander’s charming TED Talk about classical music, a talk that captivated the audience from start to finish.) Think of this as prerequisite reading for my second recommendation, also by Duarte: Slide:ology. This is more focused on presentation visuals and slides.