People enjoy familiarity and use previous styles to help them to process new information. Because the style is not what is being conveyed in a technical presentation, the style should not take centre stage nor should it distract. When a style is pervasive throughout a presentation, a collection of programs on a particular operating system, a set of web pages, or a document, it is often referred to as the look and feel.

Change, on the other hand, frustrates the audience, it requires extra thought which is not related to the presentation itself: if the style changes from item to item, this requires significantly more attention on the part of the audience which, in turn, will distract them from the presentation.

Consider the following examples:

• Steve Jobs's strong leadership at Apple has compelled most vendors of software for the Macintosh to adopt Steve's vision for the look and feel of software. As a consequence, all Mac users have the same experience in all programs. Microsoft, on the other hand, had no such vision and consequently it has taken many years for the look-and-feel on Windows to slowly converge and with Vista, Microsoft has introduced an altogether new—albeit better—look and feel for its software. Unfortunately, it will take time for other Windows software to move in that same direction once again causing problems for the user.
• Sun's Java takes significant effort to try to encourage a common look-and-feel among Java applications. Having similar layouts, similar menus, and similar functionality ensures that any novice user, once he or she becomes familiar with one Java application, then, when another application is started, the learning curve is not so significant. See Swing Look-and-Feel.
• The notation of Mathematica, while in many ways bizarre (e.g., Sin[x] calls sin(x), A[[i,j]] accesses entries of a matrix, and {{1, 2},{3, 4}} defines a matrix), is consistent due to the oversight of Stephen Wolfram; alternatively, Maple, where development has been historically less centralized, has a more natural notation (e.g., sin(x) calls sin(x), A[i,j] accesses the (i,j)th entry of the matrix, and {{1,2}, {3,4}} defines a set of two sets), is in places less consistent.

In a presentation, having a common look-and-feel makes life easy for the audience: they expect a certain colour scheme and layout which will, after a few slides, become transparent. If the first bullet point is always in the same location, the audience will train themselves too look at that spot for each subsequent slide: the presenter essentially trains his or her audience to follow.

If each slide is different, in layout or in colour or in font or a combination of these, the audience will spend most of their time processing the new format. The first 2-3 seconds of each slide will be a new discovery and during this time, the audience will loose the focus of the presentation.

Some of the characteristics of a look-and-feel are covered here:

• Colour schemes,
• Slide background,
• Consistency, and
• Continuity.