Next week I’ll be speaking at the ASOHNS meeting in Hobart.

Right now, I’m performing the ritual that happens in hotel rooms and home offices all over the world in the days before a talk.

Opening the slides one more time.

Click.
Click.
Click.

Checking everything still works.

Fonts.
Videos.
Slide order.

Because every presenter knows that beautiful slides have a habit of falling apart the moment they meet the conference computer.

You arrive early for your session.
Hand over your USB.

And suddenly something looks… wrong.

The layout has shifted.

The fonts look strange.

One slide in particular makes your stomach drop.

On your laptop, the slide says:

BETTER OUT THAN IN

On the conference computer, it appears as:

BETTER OU THAN I

Two letters gone.

The font has been substituted, and the slide you spent time designing has quietly fallen apart.

It’s a small thing.

But in that moment, your brain spirals:

If that is slide broken… what else has?

💡 ONE IDEA WELL

Moments like this reveal something important about presentations.

Many presenters believe the talk lives inside the slides.

But it doesn’t.

The talk lives inside the speaker.

Slides are visual anchors.
Images that support the story.

But they are not the story itself.

When presenters rely on slides as the script, small technical failures suddenly feel catastrophic.

Fonts change.
Videos fail.
Animations disappear.

And the whole talk feels fragile.

There’s a better way to think about it.

Slides are scenery.

The talk is the actor.

🧰 A PRACTICAL FIX

After one too many font surprises, I started doing something simple.

Before travelling to speak somewhere, I export my slides as images.

No missing fonts.
No broken layouts.

What I design is exactly what appears on the screen.

It’s a small reliability hack.

But it also reinforces something deeper.

If the talk only works when the slides are perfect…

the talk probably isn’t ready yet.

🗑️ LESS MESS, MORE MESSAGE

Once you stop relying on slides as the script, something interesting happens.

The slides start to get simpler.

Fewer words.
Fewer bullet points.
More images.

Because the slides no longer have to carry the talk.

They just have to support it.

Good presentation slides work the same way theatre scenery does.

They set the scene.
They create context.
They give the audience something to look at.

But they never compete with the actor.

If the audience is reading the slide instead of listening to the speaker, the scenery has quietly taken over the stage.

Less mess.

More message.

​
Next week in Hobart, the slides will be there.

But they’re not the talk.

They’re just the scenery.

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Speak soon,

Andy