- Big picture, big emotion slide. A huge image of a squeezed orange "the competition is killing us!", a big picture of an audience asleep "presentations are boring!", swimmer dives in the pool "let's go for it!" (lot's of cliches here, but I have seen many good ones as well). These slides are an emotional shortcut, they unlock an idea/feeling that is already present in everyone's brain quickly.
- Location port, a big image of a place, a street, a country, a customer. Pretty much like a movie director opening a film to bring us to a different time, a different place. An image of the interior of a messy store is much more powerful than a list of bullets: isles are not straight, labeling is unclear, lighting is poor.
- Relationship slide. Shapes/boxes with text, arrows, to show how issues are related, impacting each other, are dependent on each other, sit in different places on the same map.
- Data chart showing us a trend, or comparing numbers.
Common mistakes that people make today:
- Over-use the big picture slide, creating a machine gun fire of cliche images flying across the screen. Impressive pictures, but a hollow story
- Using bullets to describe what's should be inside a "location port" image
- Using bullets to describe forces/relationships/dependencies that can more easily be visualized in a relationship chart
- Making unfocused data charts showing information that is not essential to make the point that needs to be made