Handout Design

Good handout design is crucial to an oral presentation because it reinforces, both informationally and psychologically, the organization and impact of your oral performance. It takes time and care to design a good handout, and too few speakers put much thought into it. Instead, most people settle for the cheap trick of printing out their PowerPoint slides. The result: forgettable presentations with wasted takeaways.

If you want to design good handouts, think of these elements:

  1. Suitability. Do people need to have this information in their hands? How and when will they re-use it? They may need the steps for a process later, but do they need copies of pie charts they can easily obtain from other documents?
  2. Timing. Do people need the handouts in front of them as you give the presentation so that they can take notes? Or are they likely to start paging through and not pay attention to you? Think carefully about when you give them the handouts.
  3. Retrievability. Can people tell who wrote the handout, where information on it came from, when it was distributed? A simple header and documentation means that people can keep using this information for a long time.
  4. Readability. Unlike slides, which use very short bulleted terms because of the need for projection space, handouts should be more expansive. Give complete sentences and phrasings. Make sure you check and double check every handout for correctness.
  5. Design. Do the handouts use a consistent font, font size, and layout? Do they look as if five different people did them and just stapled them together or do they show cohesion and collaboration? The 'look' of the handout reinforces the psychological impact of the presentation as well as conveys a message about how the handout maker(s) regard the handout users.
  6. Resources. See BWC pp. 199 ff. on page design. Use the "Style" keys in Word to make headings consistent.
  7. Examples of a hastily-written handout, a handout that doesn't use word processing well, a handout that tries hard but is unclear, and a page from a multi-page handout that may have a tad too much information on a page.