Which Is A Guideline For Designing Effective Visuals - T-Tees - Your Answers Await, Life's Questions Unraveled

Garr Reynolds’ book Presentation Zen is a great introduction to effective use of slides in presentations. Garr also maintains a great blog on presentations. Some key points from Presentation Zen:

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Keep it simple. Your slides should complement your verbal message, not detract from it by unnecessary visual clutter. In many instances, students should be able to take in your slides in a second or two, then focus on you.
Limit bullet points and text. Keep in mind that your slides probably shouldn’t function as your own personal teleprompter. Your slides are for your students’ benefit. If your slides say just about everything that you say, then your students won’t know where to pay attention-to you or to your slides.
Use high-quality graphics. The clip art that comes with PowerPoint is certainly convenient (and more visually appealing than it used to be), but there are online sources of free, high-resolution images that can have much greater visual impact. For instance, millions of photos are available for free, educational use on the photo-sharing site Flickr under the Creative Commons license.
Use appropriate charts. As analytical designer Edward Tufte likes to point out, PowerPoint is not a great tool at sharing complicated infographics. If you have a complicated chart or graphic to share with your students, it’s often helpful to provide it to them as a handout. Simpler, more elegant charts often work better in PowerPoint. Think carefully about which kind of chart (pie, vertical bar, horizontal bar, line, etc.) will best communicate the idea you want to share with your students.
Choose your fonts well. Sans-serif fonts are often easier to read on slides than serif fonts. Too many different fonts in a slide or a presentation can be distracted, so try to limit yourself to one or two. Font size matters, too. Be sure that your fonts are large enough to be read at the back of the room. And if you’re keeping your slides simple and limiting your use of text, you can usually use very large fonts.
Spend time in the slide sorter. This is the PowerPoint view that shows you up to 20 or 30 of your slides at once. As you start to design your presentation, this view is more useful than the default one-slide-at-a-time view for structuring and organizing your content.