philipcristiano's posterous

Slide Design for Developers

October 24, 2011

So I gave this talk called How GitHub Uses GitHub to Build GitHub. Someone submitted my slides to Hacker News, where it stayed at #1 for most of the day.

This was pretty strange to me at first.

My slides are not designed for people who didn’t see the talk in person. They’re designed to support my words, not some online audience. What’s more, many commented that they found the design of the slides to be noteworthy. I’m expressly not a designer.

Working on your slide design pays off for the audience in front of you and for the audience online reading your slides later. I learned a lot designing this talk, and I think it can be helpful for you, too.