How to Build a Guide

Creating your workshop

One of the most important parts of the process is creating a guide. Here are our tips and tricks on how to make a great slide deck for your workshop. These guides will be released to all leaders upon completion, so other clubs around the world will be able to try and run a similar workshop!

Let’s start by considering your audience. The majority of your audience will be beginners, and so you’ll need to keep this in mind when designing your slides.

You’ll need to guide your workshop participants through every step of the way, and we strongly advise that you explain the reasoning / logic behind some of the trickier steps!

The boba drops guide, designed by Lynn, is a great example of how you can explain the meaning behind different lines of code:

alt alt

For CAD and PCB workshops, where the user is likely to use an unfamiliar program to make things, it can be helpful to point to different UI elements, either midway through a step, or at the start of the workshop, to save attendees struggling to find buttons.

Here’s an example, using Fusering, of how you can give a tour of the UI at the start of a workshop.

alt alt

When explaining steps, use simple language where possible! If you need to use a technical term, consider explaining it the first time that you use it!

So now that we know how to create steps and explain the meaning behind them, let’s now take a look at slide design!

Less is more. Short bullet points help keep the reader’s attention.
Balance detail. Let the speaker expand on the slide, but don’t make it so sparse that anyone gets confused about the topic at hand.
Make it pretty (later). Focus on content first. Once the content is solid, make it consistent and visually appealing.
Add relevant visuals.
- Screenshots of what participants are looking at
- Diagrams of how things work
- Fun icons
Coherence. Ensure the order and content of the slides flow logically.

The guide can be in any technology you’d like, just be mindful that it should be easy for others to present from. Some common tools are Google Slides, Figma, Canva, and PowerPoint.

Parts of the slide deck

Title
Introduction
- What will the participants be making today?
Recap
- Dig into their previous knowledge that will be expanded on soon.
New Content
- Teach them something!
- This is the main part of the workshop.
- Keep it simple on each slide.
- Break it up into digestible chunks while keeping a good flow.
- Avoid overwhelming them by introducing too many concepts at once.
Submission Requirements
Independent Time
- Give a general goal for the end: Keep it clear, concise & fun.
- Allow members to apply what they learned to create their own unique version of the project.
  - Each submission should be different, but can should be based on the same core concepts established earlier on.
How to Deploy and Submit
- Make sure to include instructions on how to get the project on GitHub and demo-able, and also fill out the submission form.
- This is a crucial step that can often be overlooked, so make sure to give clear instructions and resources for this part!
What’s Next?

Creating the slides

It’s easiest if you start by laying out the general order of the slides that you think are important and setting up a framework. The slides can be rearranged later as needed; this is just a template. This doesn’t have to be an extensive list but should encompass the main idea.

Then, go through and create the actual guide and content portion. Feel free to take breaks every so often during this process by starting work on the theming—it can help keep motivation up!

Themes and Visuals

Make the whole slideshow flow together while looking nice! Keep the slides consistent with colors, fonts, sizes, etc. It can be helpful to gather all the visuals that may be needed on a single slide at once. This helps avoid hunting around the internet looking for assets while building.

A picture tells 1,000 words, so make sure your slides feature plenty of screenshots throughout. You might even want to consider GIFs for steps with multiple parts. The choice is yours! Make sure your audience can read the information on the screen – not so big that it is awkward to read on smaller devices, but not so small that people at the back of the room can’t read the text.

Solid colors or patterned backgrounds work especially well for these slides. If you have a logo with certain colors or icons for your workshop, you can make your branding consistent across your slides. Don’t worry if you don’t have a logo yet, we can help you with this!

Your workshop will likely end up on the big screen (typically smart boards, 4K resolution). Make sure all of your assets, such as logos, graphics, and, most importantly, screenshots, are high resolution.

Stuck for design ideas and looking for some inspiration? Here are some example workshops you might want to take a look at:

Lynn’s Boba Drops Guide || David’s Fusering Guide || A BakeBuild Guide

Finally, go through the slides, proofread everything, and act like you’re a leader presenting. This can help catch many errors.

Further Comments

This guide to making guides was created in collaboration by a few of us. It draws on our experiences creating guides in the past and is adapted from a document made last spring to help someone create slides for a YSWS.
The framework above shows how we would go about making workshop slides, and it is the process used when creating the Swirl slides along with many of the current active clubs’ workshops.