For my Legal and Ethical Issues in Communication graduate course, we wrote our final papers and are having “poster sessions” tonight to explain our research and our findings…
I love the idea of a visual presentation that is tangible. Simplicity, unity through color and typeface, and an application of the rule of thirds are key to a successful posterboard. Remember making these for the science fair back when you were younger? I wish we could go back to these days!
When is the last time you created a visual OTHER than PowerPoint or Keynote to support your presentation?
Earlier this week, a reader asked a great question:
“I bought into the presentation revolution concept and looking to create a series of presentations soon. I completely agree with the advice ‘don’t use a pre-loaded template,’ but I also know I need unified design elements for a cohesive look… Where are these ‘presentation revolution 2.0′ templates that leave out the worst of the old-school PPT flaws but help me as a non-designer to create a unified look?”
When you are designing a visual presentation in Keynote or PowerPoint, you definitely want to avoid selecting a premade template. Why? First, everyone else is using one, so you won’t be able to stand out in a positive way. Second, those premade templates lead to death-by-PowerPoint. Garr Reynolds explains that many people “assume that using PowerPoint [...] means using it the way the Microsoft templates suggest (title, bullets, small charts and graphs, etc.) rather than as a simple digital storytelling tool that can amplify a person’s live message with full screen video clips, easy to see quantitative displays, high quality photography, good type, and so on” (Source). In order to join the presentation revolution, we must actually stop thinking about PowerPoint the way we currently do.
So what do we do? Where are the “Presentation Revolution” templates? The point is, as I explained to the reader question in a follow-up email, to create your own template. For non-designers, this is really, really hard because we’re so used to relying on Sedona, Craft, and Industrial. Where in the world do you begin?
Most presentation designers suggest first “going analog” to brainstorm slide design ideas. Instead of pulling up Keynote, close your computer and think about what you’re trying to convey with your slides. Do you even need slides? If not, distribute a handout to your audience and speak without that crutch. If so, it’s time to think about your own template.
Let’s say that I’m giving a presentation about dogs. I obviously don’t want to take this approach:
Instead, I want to create my own template. I decide on black-and-white images with black and white text. The repeated elements (all black-and-white pictures; the same font/typeface; the same color text) work together to unify each slide. Slide 1 will flow into 2 and 3 all the way to 25. In Keynote, I select a “black” template and remove all premade elements such as text boxes. I am in control of my template – not Keynote.
After considering what “template” I want to create, I search for images of dogs in Compfight, the only place I use to find high-quality images. I make sure I’m searching “all text” (not just “tags” from the image’s owner) as well as “Commercial” images (research what type of license you need to be using).
I save some great images for my slideshow and get to work applying the template I decided upon. Click on the video below to see me work on breaking up the slideument (above) into four separate slides:
If you’re interested in going above and beyond the standard fonts in Keynote or PowerPoint, check out DaFont. Two great resources to help you select a color palettes to unify your slides are Design Seeds and Kuler.
What is your burning presentation design question? What can I help you with this week?
Chiara Ojeda, my colleague and work bestie, is a Slideshare superstar! Her latest presentation is featured as one of three “Top Presentations of the Day.” Check her out on the front page of Slideshare here.
“How To Create Pro Slides in Less Time: Don’t Worry… Be CRAPpy” can be viewed in its glorious entirety below:
Congratulations to Chiara! This is her fourth “Top Presentations of the Day” on Slideshare. She is an amazing visual presentation designer, and if you’d like to hire her to create a visual presentation for your next speech, contact her here.
My favorite picture of the two of us was taken in our natural habitat (work, of course):
When I have an amazing student, I call him or her a “precious angel.” This is something my co-workers laugh and joke about at work… They’ll ask, “How are your precious angels this month, Alex?” Many factors go into whether or not a student is a precious angel… or “PA” for short. At the top of the list include a tenacious work ethic and a passion for learning.
Daniel Thrasher, a former Florida public school student, would be at the tip top of the PA list:
Even though this young man has never been a student of mine, and even though I’ve never met him, he is the definition of a “precious angel.” Even the Ms. Nastys of the world would agree.
My students and I were talking this morning about WHY the Nancy Duarte/Garr Reynolds method of visual design emphasizing visuals works for students. And I think this PA explained it better in his video than I did in class today.
Our goal in Professional Communication and Presentation is to examine the broken presentation medium and to see how we can repair it. In class yesterday, my students and I discussed the 7 Deadly Sins of Visual Design. I finally tweaked the slideshow for an online format and uploaded to Slideshare. Check out the presentation below:
Note: The 7 Deadly Sins of Visual Design slideshow looks best if viewed “Full Screen”
Because my students ask, and because you might be wondering, I get all of my photos from Compfight (a Flickr search engine). Because I teach at a for-profit school, I only use “Commercial” images both in the classroom and on my blog. You can probably use Creative Commons images depending upon the type of presentation you are creating. Learn about and respect all licenses! Note: The exceptions to Compfight in the Slideshare presentation above are the “Slide Sloth” images (all from a “Google search”).
My typefaces come from DaFont.com. My favorite font of all time is Komika Axis. You’ll see me use it in most of my Professional Communication and Presentation lectures as well as in my Visual Resume.
On Tuesday, I received an email from Natasha over at Duarte Designs. It read:
“I’m writing to you regarding the upcoming release of Diagrammer.com, a new project from Duarte Design, the presentations communications agency responsible for many of the best-known presentations of recent years, including Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, and many TEDTalks and business presentations for Fortune 500 companies.
After 20 years designing presentations, the Duarte team studied and identified the most common, universal mistakes that result in weak presentation slides, and during the last two years have been at work developing Diagrammer.com, an online store and resource that stocks more than 4,000 slide diagrams taken from the sketchbooks of Duarte Inc.’s designers.
Diagrammer.com will launch tomorrow, Wednesday, March 14, and will allow anyone to find, purchase (for under a dollar) and use diagrams that convey variations on key concepts and messages commonly used in presentations and talks.”
Diagrammer is definitely a great resource for budding presentation designers and business professionals. For those who know how to use it, the “shapes” tool in Keynote works just fine for creating some of these diagrams, but for those who are working to develop our design skills, each diagram is only $0.99! Duarte Designs is such an amazing company at the forefront of public speaking and presentation design, and I think Nancy Duarte is a genius, so I am a huge fan and supporter of all of the company’s products.
Indelible Branding shows off their marketing prowess with this gorgeous deck featured on Slideshare. I love the effective use of text and color. This slideshow proves that effective presentation design isn’t about eliminating all text on a slide; it’s about thinking like a designer when using a combination of images and words to effectively communicate a message. Think about it… Advertisements aren’t exclusively images. Text is placed purposefully and meaningfully. Text becomes visual itself when considering font, size, weight, color, and placement. Text ISN’T in a bulleted list in the “Industrial” template in Keynote, and text isn’t a speaker’s notes thrown up on a slide in paragraph format.
What great slideshows have you seen on Slideshare lately?
Contrast allows a photographer – or, in our case, a presenter – to manipulate the eye of the audience quickly. We immediately notice contrast. Our eye is trained for it! We immediately focus on that difference, that dominant element. In the image below, where does your eye go first?
Of course, we first see the blue window because our eyes gravitate toward the “difference.” The blue window pops out at us. But contrast is more than color. Garr Reynolds writes, “If one item in a design is clearly dominant, this helps the viewer ‘get’ the point of the design. Every good design has a strong and clear focal point and having a clear contrast among elements (with one being clearly dominant) helps. If all items in a design are of equal weight, with nothing being clearly dominant, it is difficult for the viewer to know were to begin” (Source). Contrast can mean color, shape, size, location (proximity), and shade.
In slide:ology, Nancy Duarte explains that contrast establishes relationships between elements (Source). These relationships should make sense to the audience quickly, easily, and purposefully. Duarte goes on to say that using contrast in slide design depends on your purpose. You must know your purpose, and your audience must understand your purpose through the type of contrast you use (Source).
In this way, contrast relies heavily on the principle of glance media. Advertisers know this principle well. The glance media rule says that audiences should be able to look at a visual presentation and understand exactly what that visual is trying to communicate in three seconds or less. Contrast helps audiences understand, and good contrast helps a slide become more like glance media and less like a death-by-bulletpoint nightmare.
Ryan of Duarte Designs gives some quick suggestions about creating great contrast with color in your next presentation:
