Your presentation says more than you think. So get it right.

You probably don’t need to see the Coca-Cola logo to think of Coca-Cola. Sometimes, that satisfying psssht of a can opening is enough to make you think: hmmm, an ice-cold Coke would be nice right now. The red, the shape of the bottle, the ice hitting the glass. Your brain is already there before anyone even says the name.

That’s the interesting thing about perception.

We’re constantly picking up little cues and turning them into feelings, expectations and memories.

Presentations do the same thing.

While you’re thinking about what you want people to understand, your presentation is already telling them how this idea should feel. Before people understand your idea, they’re already feeling something about it.

Think about Nike.

They can show you someone running alone before sunrise. You hear their breathing, see the sweat, maybe get one sentence on screen. There doesn’t even need to be a shoe in sight yet and somehow you already know what kind of story you’re in. Determination, effort and that slightly annoying feeling that maybe you should have gone for a run this morning too.

The visuals have already done part of the work.

Presentations can do exactly that.

If you’re introducing an ambitious idea, it should feel ambitious. If you’re showing the scale of a problem, people should be able to feel that scale. If you’re revealing something new, you can build enough curiosity that people actually want to see what comes next.

So alongside “What do I need to show?”, there’s another useful question: “What do I want people to feel when they see it?”

Let them participate.

I recently saw a presentation about world hunger where everyone in the audience was given a small paper measuring tape. Easy enough. Then they showed us the wrist measurement of a child suffering from severe malnutrition.

Suddenly, a statistic became something you could literally hold in your hands.

The thing is, we often assume a presentation has to happen between a speaker and a screen. There are so many other ways to bring people into an idea.

Give them something physical to interact with. Ask them to guess a number before revealing it. Run a live poll and let the result change what appears on screen. Build a chart as the audience makes choices. Even a simple question can make someone stop watching passively and start forming an answer in their head.

You don’t need to turn every presentation into an interactive workshop, obviously. Nobody wants to pass a ball around and “share one word about how they’re feeling” at 9am.

But when people guess, touch, choose, compare or wait for an answer, their brain has something to do. Storytelling gets much more interesting when you start thinking this way. Sometimes the slide carries the idea, sometimes it’s the speaker, and sometimes it’s an object in someone’s hand.

The presentation is what happens when all of those things work together.

How it looks changes how it lands.

Imagine telling an audience that something happens 3,000,000 times every year. You could put that number underneath a chart, next to five other boring statistics. Or you could let 3,000,000 take over the screen and find a way to make that scale tangible.

The British art collective Stan’s Cafe did exactly that by using grains of rice to represent people, with each grain standing for one person. Suddenly, millions stop being an abstract number and become something you can actually see. Because three million is easy to read. Actually understanding what three million means? That’s where the presentation can help.

Scale, typography, images, motion and even empty space change the weight we give to information. A huge image can create a feeling before a single word appears.

This is also why bringing design in at the end with a “cool, now make it look nice” wastes so much of what a presentation can do. Sometimes all you need for that slide is a six-meter image. Sometimes you need the data to move to show people what it really means, and you need absolutely nothing on screen because everyone should be looking at the person speaking. The visual decision comes from what needs to happen in that moment.

So, what is your presentation saying? People don’t experience information as a perfectly organised list of facts. We react, anticipate, compare, make connections and remember the moments when everything makes sense.

So when you’re building your next presentation, think about what people should know when they leave the room, but also what you want them to experience while they’re there. There’s a reason the sound of a can opening can make you crave a Coke, or why watching someone run before sunrise can make you feel something before Nike even shows you a shoe.

The message is only one part of what stays with us. The feeling around it matters too.

How you made people feel will stick with them far longer than the exact words you said or the slides they saw. When storytelling, design and the person presenting work together, the idea doesn’t just make sense in the moment.

It stays with you.

So, what will people remember from your presentation?