The Mobile Presenter

It's painful having to criticise your idols, but sometimes you must: Dear Susan Kare, please don't talk over your quote slides!

Susan Kare, in case that name doesn't ring a bell, is the woman who designed all the icons and some of the fonts for the original Macintosh computer. The design language she came up with influenced how we interact with computers up to this day.

I saw a recent talk that she gave at Y Combinator where she told a lot of anecdotes and background stories about her early days at Apple and what else she has done since then (spoiler: a lot). She also used a lot of slides with quotes from people who inspired her.

And here was the problem in an otherwise fine, entertaining and inspiring talk: She would put up a quote slide. But then, instead of giving the audience a moment to read it, or better yet, read it out to them, she kept on talking. As a member of the audience, you had to first read the quote to even understand what she was talking about at that point, since she often provided additional context. Which you couldn't appreciate without having had a chance to read the quote first and process what it was trying to tell you; those were (mostly) meant to be insightful thoughts after all.

Again, please don't do that. Using quotes is perfectly fine if they help bring a point across. You may want to double-check if the quote is accurate and that the person credited really did say that, but that's a separate issue. As far as presenting is concerned:

• Put the quote on a slide, in a big and readable font (no fancy ones, please).
• Bring up the slide, pause for a second, then read out the quote to the audience. That will give them a chance to really grasp what's going on.
• Leave the slide up a little longer and, maybe, as Susan Kare did, provide some additional context. But only now!

"Dear Susan Kare, we need to talk about your use of quote slides" by Dirk Haun is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.