Slidedocs: Spread ideas with effective visual documents

Extract:
Slidedocs is a free e-book available at www.duarte.com/slidedocs. Duarte is a consultant and author on corporate communication and presentations. She believes that modern organizations need anew form of written communication, the Slidedoc, which delivers more information than the sketchy key points used in oral presentation slides but doesn’t overwhelm time-poor readers with many pages of dense text. Slidedocs should be used when “You have detailed information to convey, but you won’t be around to explain it; you have detailed subject matter that is conducive to being conveyed with visuals and prose; and people consume your information better when it is broken into smaller, more visual chunks” (Duarte, 2014: 8). Slidedocs are created using presentation software such as PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides. They feature color, pictures, hyperlinks, graphics, and text—ideally not more than 250 words and one concept per slide. They are designed to be read like a book rather than projected on a screen. Duarte’s 165-page e-book in Slidedoc format explains the whys and hows of this new form of communication. Although the Slidedoc concept has gained considerable traction in the corporate world, it appears to be largely unknown to academics.