If It Needs Eleven-Point Type, Cut It

A menu with ninety items is telling you something about the kitchen.

Not that they're generous. That they haven't decided. Somewhere back there is a freezer holding the ingredients for all ninety, and the odds of any one of them being the thing that kitchen is genuinely great at are low.

The best restaurants you've been to had short menus. Sometimes aggressively short. It reads as confidence because it is: somebody chose.

Slides work the same way, and eleven-point type is the tell.

Nobody sets out to use eleven-point type. It happens the way it always happens — the text didn't fit at twenty-four, so it went to eighteen, and then there was one more thing that really did need saying, so fourteen, and by the time it's eleven the slide has stopped being a slide and become a document that happens to be projected.

The room can't read it. That's the obvious cost.

The real cost is what it says about you. A dense slide means every idea on it was judged equally important, which means none of them were ranked, which means the person who knows this business best has not yet decided what the point is. The room will notice that before they notice any individual bullet.

There's also a mechanical problem. People cannot read and listen at the same time — not really. Put a paragraph on screen and the room reads it, at their own speed, while you talk over yourself. You've made your own slide your competition.

The rule is boring: one idea per slide. If a slide needs a second idea, it needs to be a second slide, and slides are free.

Then say the thing that isn't written. The slide holds the claim; you hold the story, the number behind it, the reason it matters. If your talk track is just the slide read aloud, one of you isn't necessary.

And everything you cut isn't gone. It goes in the appendix, where it belongs — ready for the person who asks, invisible to everyone who doesn't.

If it has to shrink to fit, it isn't a formatting problem. You just haven't decided yet.

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More on building a deck that's decided in The Pitch Deck Book.

Composite characters, invented companies. The mistakes are real; the people aren't.