3 Ways to Use Contrast in Presentations That Will Keep Your Audience Focused

When creating a presentation, one of the easiest ways to keep your audience’s attention is with the use of contrast, not only in the visual design but also in the story you tell and how you tell it. By pairing contradictory images, ideas, and even body movements you can capture and hold your audience’s focus. The three primary ways you can use contrast to your advantage are:

• The Design
• The Story
• Your Delivery

The Design

The visual design of your presentation is the most obvious place to incorporate contrast. Black and white, dark and light, square and circle, and other opposites control your audience’s awareness, giving them a focal point to rest their attention.

Contrast is more than just placing two contrasting elements right next to each other. You can grab your audience’s attention in other ways by contrasting the content of your slides from one slide to the next. For example, if you have a few content-rich slides with text or graphics, follow them with one slide that has just one or two words on a solid black or solid white background. The stark contrast will force your audience to sit up and take notice.

The Story

When it comes to your story, you can use contrast as a storytelling technique by deliberately juxtaposing different ideas to engage your audience’s interest. In effect, you create tension between contrasting elements and then resolve the tension, providing a sense of relief. Here are a few ways to incorporate contrast in your story:

• Create a structure of problem-solution, cause-effect, compare-contrast, advantage-disadvantage, risk-opportunity, status quo-proposed changes, and so on.
• Discuss past/present versus future, or “what is” versus “what could be.” Build suspense by describing the present state of affairs, contrasted by a potentially much better future if they take action or implement your ideas.
• Contrast emotional content with facts and data throughout your presentation. This not only keeps your audience engaged as you continually contrast the types of content, but it also appeals to different types of listeners who either resonate with creative stories or are driven by cold, hard facts.

Your Delivery

In delivering your presentation, incorporate contrast by varying the pace, volume, and tone of your voice. For example:

• Speak quickly and then slow down.
• Speak quietly and then get louder.
• Talk a lot and then pause to add emphasis.
• Speak in short phrases and then longer sentences.
• Use contrasting words and phrases, as Dan Pink famously does in his TED Talk, The Puzzle of Motivation.

It’s also important to contrast body movements to avoid using the same repetitive gestures throughout your presentation. For instance, if you repeatedly “chop” the air or thrust your arm, the gesture will lose its effectiveness. You can improve the impact of your body movements by juxtaposing different gestures, for instance:

• When discussing the passage of time, gesture from left (past) to right (future).
• Use your hands and fingers to emphasize contrasting sizes or heights like small-large, short-tall, and down-up. For example, pinch your fingers together to show something tiny and contrast it with big, open arms to show something large.

Contrast is an integral technique to create memorable presentations and gives you a powerful way to energize your talks, improve the design and structure of your slides, and keep your audience engaged. If you’re looking for more ways to use contrast to your advantage in your presentation design, storytelling, and delivery, I’d be happy to help.