What Hitchcock Taught Me About My Slide Decks

I counted eleven separate elements on the first slide of a pitch I sat through at an industry event. I remember none of the content. Hitchcock worked out why: every element in a composition fights for the same attention, and if you don't control the hierarchy, neither does your audience.

I counted them during the talk because there was nothing else to do.

Eleven elements on the opening slide. A header. A company logo. Six bullet points. A pull-quote graphic sitting in the corner. A footnote citation. A stock image of people shaking hands. And a progress bar at the bottom that I don't think was intentional.

The presenter knew what they were talking about. The content was probably good. I have no idea what the pitch was about because I spent the first four minutes cataloguing the slide instead of listening to the person in front of me. They had told me, without saying a word, that none of it was especially important.

I went home and opened a presentation I'd given the month before. I stopped counting at eight elements on slide two.

The filmmaker who solved it first

Gustavo Mercado's The Filmmaker's Eye is a book about composition. It breaks down how directors choose what to put in the frame, where to put it, and how big to make it. The central principle is what Mercado calls Hitchcock's Rule: the size of a subject in the frame should be proportional to its importance in the story at that moment.

When a character's face fills the screen, you know it matters. When they're a small figure in a wide landscape, you know the environment is the point. Hitchcock built the hierarchy into the image rather than explaining it. Audiences read it without realising they're reading it.

The reason this works is that every element in the frame competes for the viewer's attention. The eye moves to size, then contrast, then position. If everything is the same size, the eye doesn't know where to go. The brain fills in its own hierarchy, which may have nothing to do with what you're trying to say.

Every element on a slide is fighting for the same attention. You put them there. You started the fight.

A slide is a frame. The same rules apply. And most business slides violate Hitchcock's Rule for every element simultaneously. Everything is roughly the same size, roughly the same visual weight, and therefore roughly equally forgettable.

The T-Shirt Rule

There's a second principle from Compelling Communication that cuts to the same problem from a different angle. The T-Shirt Rule says you should put no more text on a slide than you'd put on a T-shirt.

This sounds like a simplification. It holds up.

The logic is about human bandwidth. Your audience is either reading your slide or listening to you. They cannot do both at the same time. The moment you put enough text on a slide that someone has to read it to understand it, you've asked them to stop listening. A slide dense with bullet points is a document with a person standing next to it.

The T-Shirt Rule forces a choice. If you can only fit one thing, you have to decide what the one thing is. Most slides avoid that decision. They include everything and leave the audience to figure out what matters.

Your audience is either reading your slide or listening to you. A busy slide is a choice to be ignored.

Put both principles together and the problem with that eleven-element slide comes into focus. The presenter hadn't composed it. They'd populated it. Every element was fighting the others for attention, and the audience concluded, correctly, that none of it was urgent.

What a composed slide looks like

I've become slightly tedious about this in the time since. I rebuild decks before pitches. I make my team rebuild theirs. The principle is simple enough that it fits in a sentence: one claim, one supporting thing, nothing else.

The supporting thing can be a number, a photograph, a short quote, a simple diagram. It should be large enough that it reads as the visual anchor, the thing Hitchcock would have put in close-up. The claim sits above or beside it at a size that says "this is the sentence."

The claim and the support are in a relationship with each other, and the rest of the slide is empty space. Empty space is not wasted. It makes both elements legible.

A slide like this doesn't need to be read. It can be absorbed in about two seconds, which means your audience spends the other fifty-eight seconds of that slide listening to you elaborate on it.

The harder part

Stripping a slide down to one claim and one supporting element is a thinking problem, first.

When a slide has six bullet points, it usually means the presenter hasn't decided which one matters. The six points are a hedge. They cover the ground so nobody can accuse them of missing something. The slide is protecting the presenter, not serving the audience.

Deciding which point is the one means committing to a position. It means saying "this is what I believe matters most about this topic right now, in this room, for these people." That's a harder thing to do than listing everything you know.

But it's the thing audiences actually need. They need to know where to look. They need a frame that tells them what matters. Give them eleven things and they'll give you none of their attention. Give them one thing, made plain, and they'll give you the room.

Hitchcock understood this. He built hierarchies into every frame so the audience never had to guess. The job of a slide is no different.