I made a few suggestions and emailed him a sample of possibilities (B). Made a few points as follows, but his assistants assured me that they had already tried to get him to jump to the next level, unsucessfully unfortunately:
- Too many great ideas on one slide - all is lost in the jumble, none are remembered
- At least use a well designed template as a base
- With a customized color palette
- Abstain from using centre justified lists
- Use bold sparingly
- Empty space = breathing space
- Lime green and red vibrate annoyingly together
- Use your branding - you already have it!
Nothing happened.
C
Last time I checked, he was still doing the same thing. This series is from December 2008. Too bad. Great messages, poor container.
Basic Design Concepts
I do tend to keep a few basic design concepts in the forefront when I design and teach PowerPoint.
Contrast :
Good idea to make sure your audience is not challenged by your colour choices. Your fonts should stand out quite well above your chosen background colour or image. As a loose rule, your background colour should be dark if your presentation will be given in a large hall, projected onto a screen with light coloured fonts. If, on the other hand, your presentation is on a laptop, to a small group of people, then a light coloured background with darker fonts is quite acceptable.
Alignment :
The eye perceives relationships between items and translates this in the mind to actual relationships. It is best not to arbitrarily place elements on the slides without first thinking about their relationship to other elements. First rule of thumb is to align your bullets with the same spacing, tabbing, justification, and bullet symbol choice. Another loose rule: center justification is amateur, use it sparingly.
Repetition :
Again the eye. It picks up patterns very quickly, and therefore breaks in the pattern as well. This principle also relates to logos, company colours, fonts, line thickness, placement of images.
Proximity :
Organize your info in related blocks ... if it doesn't belong with the rest of the information, don't clog up the space.
Animation :
Don't wow them too much with PPT's special effects. Then it just become an exercise in animation and the content is lost. Study the various possibilities and apply the one which best suits the problem in question. Don't exaggerate. As for slide transitions, my experience tells me that a "wipe right" is the easiest slide transition for slow processors and the most pleasing to the eye. Too many different transitions become annoying to the viewer.
Builds of information on the slide, on the other hand can help you keep control of the audience's attention. If you give them all your text at the start, they will read ahead of you and then wait impatiently for you to catch up with your explanations. "on-mouse-click" builds for each of your bullet points is a great idea.
Consistency :
Same background image and colours, same fonts, same alignment, same transitions, same symbols, same tabbing and indents, same style of images, same type and style of graphs and the list goes on. Gee, sounds like "branding"! If you import slides from another presentation, PowerPoint will update the content to reflect the new template look and colours; be prepared to do editing on the balance of elements not updated.
Typography :
Be consistent in your use of fonts. Don't mix too many fonts. Use one font for your headings and a different font style for your body text and bullets. As an example, you could use a sans serif font for the headings (Windows = verdana ; Mac = Arial ) and a serif font for the body text (Windows = times ; Mac = Georgia) You can also include a symbol font. Make sure to check the box, "save fonts along with presentation" when saving your file for a different computer taht may not have any non-standard fonts.
Breathing room :
And lastly, leave a bit of empty space on the slide. Just because there is room there, doesn't mean you have to put something in it.
