Presentation Slides

Two-week course starting March 17, 2025

Sometimes you only have a few minutes to make a lasting impression on a decision-maker, client, or colleague. If you overwhelm your audience with endless slides that all look the same, they’ll miss the important stuff, like What outcome are you hoping for? What do you want your audience to do? What do you want them to remember?

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use audience awareness as a tool to distill complex concepts, eliminate overcrowded slides, and guide your audience to what’s most important. This workshop focuses on written messaging and isn’t a graphic design class, but we will talk about how to organize the content on your slides for maximum audience impact.

Inside the Course

We’ll email you recorded lessons bi-weekly. Watch them on your own schedule. Then, join us for live office hours to ask questions about the materials and go over your own presentation drafts with an instructor. 

Week 1:

Monday, March 17

Lesson 1: Your audience and the ART • Our tool for audience awareness and message planning. Why present something if nothing happens as a result?

Wednesday, March 19

Lesson 2: Planning the audience’s experience • Only in our signature workshop: learn how to design your presentation around participation.

Thursday/Friday, March 20/21

Office Hours

Week 2:

Monday, March 24

Lesson 3: Slides designed for engagement • What the eye-tracking research shows us about capturing the audience’s attention so they don’t zone out.

Wednesday, March 26

Lesson 4: Sentences that tell stories • Keep the text clear, easy, and minimal. 4 key guidelines for writing impactful slide copy.

Thursday/Friday, March 27/28

Office Hours

This class is highly interactive. With Zoom as our preferred platform, we use polling, chat, discussion, and application to keep participants engaged and on their toes. Participants bring a piece of their own writing and work on it during the sessions.

“On a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is excellent, I’d rate this workshop a 15! It was chock full of great ideas for developing presentations that truly pop.”

-Damariz Winborne, Global Operations Center Manager Freddie Mac

After the masterclass, you will be able to:

  • Start with the ART to strategically plan each presentation before designing slides 

  • Plan around how audiences interact with presentation slides

  • Build slide decks around moments that invite participation from the audience

  • Leverage smart information design to guide the audience’s attention and balance text and images on slides

  • Write slide text that is easy to read and doesn’t compete with the speaker

Participants will keep:

  • 30-day access to the course lesson videos

  • The ART tool for Audience Awareness

  • Bold Type’s Better Presentations checklist

  • Bold Type’s guide to “10 Types of Clutter to Cut From Your Sentences”

  • The training deck packed with before-and-after examples

Pricing:

  • $249 early bird until February 28, 2025; $299 starting March 1, 2025

"This writing workshop led by Grace from Bold Type was one of the best trainings I've ever taken. As Product Managers, so much of our job boils down to communication. Grace reminded us how to communicate effectively through writing. I picked up a handful of new tips and tools and have found myself referencing my notes frequently in the weeks since."

- Matthew Ambrogi, Senior Associate Product Management, Capital One