How to Build a Guide

One of the most important parts of the process is creating a guide. Here are our tips and tricks on how to make a great slide deck for your workshop.

Things to consider when making the presentation:

Less is more on on the slidedeck, short bullet points help keep the reader’s attention
Let the leader expand on the slide, but also don’t make it too sparse to where they are confused
Make it pretty and consistent! BUT only do this when the content portion is done, it’s easy to get caught up on this (don’t waste too much time on this)
Add relevant visuals to facilitate the ideas
- screenshots of what they are looking at
- diagrams of how things work
- fun icons
Ensure the order and the content of the slides are coherent, don’t jump around too much and keep a good flow

The guide can be in any technology you’d like, just be mindful that it should be easy for others to present from.
Some common ones are: Google Slides, Figma, Canva and Powerpoint

Parts of the slidedeck

Title
Introduction
- What will the participants be making today?
Recap
- Dig into their previous knowledge that will be expanded on soon
New content
- Teach them something!
- The main part of the guide/workshop
- Keep it simple on each slide
- Break it up into digestible chunks while keeping a good ordered flow
- Try to not make it overwhelming through introducing too many concepts at once
Go over submission requirements
Independent Time
- Give a general goal for the end: Keeping it clear, concise & fun
- Allow the members to apply what they learned to create their own unique version of the project
How to deploy and submit
What’s next?

Creating the slides

It’s easiest if you start by laying out the general order of the slides that you think are important and setting up a framework through this. The slides can be rearranged later as needed, this is currently just a template.
This doesn’t have to be an extensive list, but should encompass the main idea. Then go through and create the actual guide and content portion, Feel free to take breaks every so often during this process by starting work on the theming, it can help keep motivation up!

Themes and visuals!

Make the whole slideshow flow together while looking nice!
Keep the slides consistent with colors, fonts, sizes etc.
It can be helpful to gather all the visuals that may be needed on a single slide at once. This helped me not have to keep hunting around the internet looking for stuff to do.

Finally, go over the slides and proof-read everything and act like you’re a leader presenting; this can help catch so many errors.

Further Comments

This isn’t an extensive list but is adapted from a document made back in the Spring to help out someone creating slides for a YSWS. The quick framework above is how we would go about making workshop slides, and is the process I went through when creating the Swirl slides and a few other workshop slides myself.