Why You Should Use Human Faces on Slides

Sometimes, people think that in order for a slide to have impact, it has to be MORE.

Like, literally have more stuff on it. More pictures, more icons, more images, more color. Not so.

When a slide needs to communicate a complex, abstract idea or emotion to an audience, I do the complete opposite: I do less.

I look for an image that shows a human being embodying or expressing that idea.

Using photos of people is information-dense, and can quickly illustrate the concepts on your slide while enabling people to emotionally connect with—AKA humanizing—the data.

But, just choose one.

 

People Connect with Photos of People.

According to Psych Professor David Alais, of the University of Sydney, “We are such a sophisticated social species and face recognition is very important…You need to recognise who it is, is it family, is it a friend or foe, what are their intentions and emotions? Faces are detected incredibly fast.”

Being able to quickly detect human faces and their emotional states is critical for our survival. Further, researchers from the University of Salento, Italy presented pairs of ads with and without faces to respondents—and the ads with faces performed better. For 31 out of 48 pairs of ads, respondents preferred the ad with a face. And for 44 out of 48 ad pairs, ads with faces attracted more attention. However, this attention diminished as exposure time increased from 0.5 to 3 seconds.

So to ensure the audience’s is paying attention to you, the presenter, when your next slide contains a photo with a human face, considering pausing for a couple of seconds to let them take it in before you start speaking.

 

Photos of People Can Help Illustrate Abstract Concepts.

Photography is great for illustrating emotional states, consumer sentiments, people interacting with each other, and concepts too abstract or complex for icons.

 

 

Photos of People Can Help Humanize Your Content

For consumer insights presentations, photography can help your audience realize that consumer groups and segments are—gasp, real people. Photos of or supplied by respondents is especially humanizing, and helps get the audience closer to the research, especially for those who were unable to observe it in real-time.

Photos of People Are Information-Dense.

A good high-quality photo can help your audience get at a glance what the slide is all about. And they’re easier for the audience to remember: A 2015 study showed that advertising content is more easily recalled when advertisements include faces [1].

And let’s be real….

Photos of People Can Help Balance a Slide That’s a Bit Light on Content.

We all have those slides where all it needs to make the point is a quote, a single data point, or sentence or two. You can absolutely lay these slides out with that minimal content and create lots of impact, but when that’s not enough, a photo can help illustrate it or really bring the point home.

Using layouts where a photo takes up half of a slide or the entire width of the slide can do double duty — the photo helps illustrate the concept, and the work of laying out that single sentence or data point becomes much easier. Now it can be laid out in a much tighter area with ample whitespace.

 

 

But, Choose One Photo.

ONE photo per idea. Very rarely is it a good idea to make image collages.

Using multiple images to try to triangulate a visual explanation of an idea is mood boarding. Which is a powerful technique when you’re presenting something exploratory, such as a brand identity direction or an exploratory research topic. But it’s a weak way to communicate a singular idea in what’s supposed to be an authoritative, impactful presentation.

Because by the time you’re deigning to take up people’s time to present that idea to them, it should be so well thought through and honed down to its essence that it can be summarized with a single image. This requires editing, which is really just the process of making choices with intent.

Just like with writing, editing—the act of deliberately choosing some things, and deleting other things—is necessary for visual impact. So when using a cluster of images to communicate an idea, so that the idea you intend to communicate exists somewhere in the space between them (and the work of figuring out that meaning falls to the audience), is that intentional? Or is it that your idea is difficult for you to explain clearly and succinctly so it’s kind of like [these images]? Or is it that you couldn’t decide which image was right for this idea—so you chose all of them? Or is it that you’re relying on Google Images for photos, and these are all you could find? Or all of the above?

Multiple low-quality images do not equal one high quality high resolution image.

One intentionally-chosen image is going to make a greater impact on your audience, be easier to understand in all its information density, and be easier to remember. Take a sec and picture that “Afghani Girl” photo in your mind’s eye. Exactly.

Every single one of the pixelated, low-res yoinked-from-Google-images pics that still have the iStockPhoto watermark on them will be forgotten by the time you go to the next slide.

So I’m not against collages when they’re intentional—there are smart ways to tile images so that they become one cohesive, easy-to-understand whole.

But when you settle for a visual gobbledygook of random images, an opportunity to impact your audience with that idea is lost.

 

🦶📝

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1 Droulers, O., & Adil, S. (2015). Could Face Presence In Print Ads Influence Memorization?. Journal of Applied Business Research (JABR), 31(4), 1403–1408.