Herding chickens

The major drawback of text on screen is that the audience cannot help but read it. Mountain View Ca. They are hypnotised like a chicken. It is important in construction of p2 (the supportive media) to remember that one’s audience, like chickens, are very easily distracted by shiny things and extraneous image noise. Wanderful Media. It is beneficial to your message to minimise such distractions and herd the chickens in the direction you desire. Those random words have already been read by people drawn to the image below. please check out the post on the hypnotised chicken.

Another way of describing this concept is of maximising signal to noise ratio. News broadcasts on television are an increasingly bad example of how so much information is displayed on the screen that it becomes impossible to process any of it; our eyes are constantly drawn from one (shiny) thing to another. What appears as a Smörgåsbord of delights becomes impossible to sample anything of value due to constant distraction.

There are many levels and nuances of noise in supportive media that might distract the audience. At the most basic level this might range from template backgrounds, poor font choice and bad colour schemes to brand icon/identity issues on every slide. Individual slides might be distracting by overcomplicating data slides, data extraneous to the single message, poor image composition or quality, overuse of text or the use of clip art. On higher levels still issues such as grammatical error, non complimentary fonts, poor colour projection and even slide transition itself can distract the audience from their concentration upon the intended message. Every distraction leads away from the message.In design, less is more.


The purpose of the media is support, not distraction. Ensure that everything on your slide directs solely towards your message.

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