Never begin a multimedia project without first outlining its structure.

Tay Vaughan

Slides

Slides are the building blocks of a multimedia presentation. Slides can contain a piece of text, a graphic, a film or video tape, or animation. Heba uses a sound bite as a good analogy for a slide: "a short, condensed, and highly focused piece of information which can be understood immediately" (132). Slides should be modular units that are self-contained so that they stand on their own. In the planning stage of the project, an important approach to slide design is storyboarding. The storyboards contain the sketches and notes that describe in great detail each image, sound, text, animation piece, movie segment, and navigation cue. Storyboards play an important role in the planning process.

When planning a multimedia project, it is the development team's responsibility to determine the contents of each slide. Several scrolled pages of text do not make a well-designed slide, unless the information is essential for a particular context or purpose, such as a complex training program. If a project needs a large amount of printed material, perhaps a multimedia presentation is not the best environment to use.