Avoiding Decoration

Don’t confuse decoration with communication. As brothers Chip and Dan Heath say in Made to Stick, ‘We need to end once and for all the cult of clip art, as well as the splinter church of stock photography. “Show, don’t tell” doesn’t mean that you take your slide about “thinking globally” and add a clip-art world map.’ Use graphics that genuinely help the audience to understand, and don’t be afraid to bring props into the room to supplement your slides.

Slides Should Reinforce Your Words

Well known marketer Seth Godin knows as much as most about persuasion, and doing things that aren’t necessarily the norm. ’Bullets’, he says, ‘are for the NRA’. Presenters should create cue cards but ‘put them in your hand’ and not on screen. Then, as the slides don’t need to serve as cue cards they should ‘reinforce your words, not repeat them’.

Attractiveness vs. Effectiveness

Mike Pulsifer, author of the blog Thoughts on Presenting and Design, argues that presenters should really rethink their design. There is a big difference between attractive slides, and effective slides. What is the point of slides that look good, if they don’t convey your message? Take time to rework your presentation, and “change your whole office culture.” We couldn’t agree more.

Number of Slides

Don’t worry about how many slides your sales presentation runs to. As Jan Schultink, author of the well-regarded Sticky Slides blog notes, when people worry about the number of slides they have “they are choosing the wrong metric; number of slides, kilos of printout, presentation file size, it does not matter. Time is the only relevant factor.”

Other Visual Aids

Remember that slides aren’t the only possible visual aids. We think PowerPoint is great when used well, but they aren’t the only visual aid available. Make use of flip charts, boards and posters, paper handouts, your product, video, or other media if it helps to get your message across.

Using Your Surroundings

Own the room. This isn’t going to be possible when presenting for a rushed ten minutes in a prospect’s office, but there are plenty of situations where it is possible to get in to dress a room in advance. For Jon Steel, author of Perfect Pitch, ‘the room in which a pitch is delivered should be a physical manifestation of both the agency and its idea’, and the room ‘has to feel different’. This might mean dressing a room with examples of work, images produced in the research process, or even visual aides to make up the presentation. Dressing a room to relate to the core message of a presentation helps bring the message to life. But remember that the room must support the presentation, not distract from it. Keep things ‘on-topic’.

Hand-Outs

Do more with hand-outs. For many pitching solutions to creative briefs, it is important to remember that the prospect is buying both an idea and somebody to implement that idea. For this reason, leave-behinds should not simply consist of slide print-outs. They shouldn’t simply repeat the material of the presentation, but go further to summarise this idea in a way that helps to ‘demonstrate the relationship between the people who work in the agency and that idea’ (Jon Steel, Perfect Pitch). For Steel’s agencies, this means asking staff to bring in photos, write personal stories, and then binding these collections in glossy print. Pitching to design and build a school? Ask staff to tell stories about the best places they have studied in. Want to leave your slides behind? Record narration, or host slides online.

We asked our expert PowerPoint slide designers for their personal PowerPoint design tips to help you to keep your slides in shape, whatever your level of presentation design experience.

Keep it simple

We all know that slide after slide of bullet points tends to disengage audiences, but taking the visuals too far by creating busy, garish graphics and overdone animations will be just as irritating.

For each slide, think about the key message and make sure everything on screen is complementing that. If you find yourself inserting more than five or six photographs on one slide, perhaps it would be better to express the ideas behind them in your narration instead, and use a simple diagram to represent the key message. Over-complicated shapes and animations can also distract from, more than reinforce, your point. Try to stick to regular shapes and subtle animations: a small silhouette of a person moving simply across the page will look better than a photo dancing across.

The key thing to remember is that you are not creating a presentation for entertainment value or purely for visual interest; the visuals are there for a purpose, to add clarity to what you are saying and keep the audience focused on the right thing at the right time. If there’s too much going on, or too many interesting photos to look at, you can easily lose control of the communication flow.

Stick to a sensible colour palette

Garish slides filled with contrasting primary colours look cheap and nasty. Stick to a simple and subtle colour scheme based around your company’s brand guidelines and work everything around that. Look at your company’s brand book or website for inspiration, and choose fill colours and font colours that stand out well from the background without clashing too much. Click on Format > Slide Design to bring up a selection of colour schemes so you can choose one that best complements your background image, or if you need to set specific colours to match your brand guidelines, you can click on Edit Colour Schemes… below the preset schemes to set your own custom colours. View a short tutorial that shows you how to do this – choosing a slide colour palette.

Design takes time

Presentations rarely have long lead times, but you can’t get away with adding new slides the night before a deadline that feature a bunch of obviously rushed graphs and animations. Allow yourself time to really perfect every aspect of your slides. You want to make sure that you are using an effective visual aid, not just a jumble of graphics. If you’re really pushed for time, you’re better off copying and pasting elements from other slides in the deck and modifying them, rather than starting from scratch.

Crop tool

Use this to trim a photo so that the key part of the picture is more obvious. This is particularly useful when using a screen grab; the image you need can be easily singled out from an image of the entire screen.

To do this, select the image you wish to crop, and then click the ‘crop’ icon (found on the picture tool bar). This will bring up black corner outlines, and in the mid section of each wall. These can be dragged at will to create the edit of the image you want. Don’t worry if you crop out too much and need to undo it – PowerPoint remembers the entire image even after you’ve trimmed it, so you can always drag the crop back to ‘uncover’ more of the original image if you need to.

Customise your toolbar

A must for any PowerPoint user, a customised toolbar gives you quick access to tools you use most frequently, thus cutting down time.

To create a toolbar, click Tools > Customise. This will open the Customize window. Under the ‘Toolbars’ tab, click New. Give your new toolbar a name, and then it will pop up on your screen – completely blank for now. Now clicking on the different ‘Categories’ in the left hand list will display all the toolbar buttons related to that category. This can be done for just about every function possible – have a play around, and choose the tools most useful to you. Key categories our designers find especially useful are the Format, Table, and Drawing as these provide useful tools for building slides. View a short tutorial that shows you how to do this – PowerPoint Toolbar Customisation.

Drawing with the ‘shift’ key

The shift key is your ‘regulator’ when creating autoshapes or lines. When drawing a rectangle or oval, holding down the ‘shift’ key keeps the shape regular, so you get a perfect square or circle (the same goes for more complicated shapes like stars). Also, when resizing a photo or shape, holding down ‘shift’ will preserve the dimensions of the object so that it doesn’t end up distorted.

‘Shift’ is especially useful when drawing lines – holding it down will only let you draw a line that is perfectly horizontal, vertical, or along a limited number of diagonal angles. This can save massive amounts of time and effort when drawing graphs or tables. View a tutorial featuring more handy keyboard tools like this – Keyboard shortcuts for PowerPoint.

Set AutoShape default

This handy feature enables you to determine the fill properties and line properties of a new AutoShape. All you need to do is format one shape with the right properties, and then every new shape you draw will look the same. This makes it much quicker and easier to create consistent graphics to ensure your slides look professional.

To set an AutoShape default, create a shape and double click on it, then choose the settings you want from the various formatting options (fill colour and style, line colour and weight etc.) Then check the box that says ‘Set AutoShape Defaults’. Now any new shape or line you draw will have the same properties.

Use drop shadow on text

This tool can make all the difference to the clarity of your text, especially when contrast is lacking because of the colours you have to use. A drop shadow is a contrasting shadow that sits just behind the text, enabling it to stand out better. In order to get the best result from PowerPoint’s shadow function, it is advised that you select a colour several shades darker than the colour on which your text rests. This will avoid the harsh contrast that might result from the use of plain black or directly contrasting colour, but still make it easily visible.

To apply the drop shadow, first make sure you have the ‘shadow settings’ toolbar available, which can be accessed through the Tools > Customise menu. Select the text you need to distinguish, then choose the colour required for the shadow via the drop down selection box on the shadow settings toolbar. You are then able to fine-tune the positioning of the shadow relative to the text through the use of the ‘nudge’ buttons on the Shadow Settings toolbar. For the most pleasing results, it is often effective to make sure the shadow hugs the text as closely as possible without disappearing under it altogether.

Subjective VS Objective Quality in PowerPoint Design

What makes a slide work? Well, we at m62 believe the ingredients are a strong and focused message, engaging slide visuals, intelligent presentation design and attractiveness, and professional delivery. But interestingly, since the design is the ’skin’ of the presentation, the icing on a painstakingly-assembled cake, this is often the aspect that is most frequently subjected to scrutiny, debate, and adjustment ad infinitum.

When quality-auditing each other’s work our designers follow an interesting distinction between aspects of design that can contribute to (or detract from) the slides’ effectiveness, and aspects that similarly affect their ‘eye candy’ quality.  We refer to this distinction as Subjective VS Objective Quality Standards (or SOQS). Understanding this difference can save presenters and presentation designers a lot of time and effort.

Aesthetics and Presentation Design

When designers or presenters argue about whether a slide would look better in blue or green, they aren’t really making any claims about the colours themselves; they are not disagreeing on any point of fact. What they are doing is describing something about themselves and what kinds of things they find enjoyable. Discussions about slide design are often simply disagreements over aesthetics  - a very powerful, but frequently misunderstood, form of judgment.

It is frequently very interesting to compare and discuss our aesthetic judgments. Yet, it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of time arguing over whether a blue shape or green shape would look better on a slide – but, amazingly, that’s what a lot of presenters do.

Except where corporate brand guidelines apply (which frequently dictate colour palettes but little else where PowerPoint is concerned), our designers have free rein to apply their artistic instinct and make the slides look as stunning as possible. In this sense, having freedom of design within a framework of meaning (the storyboard) and rules (the Objective Quality Standards), our designers are artists collaborating on a work of craft. These Objective Quality Standards “clips the wings of genius” (Kant), making sure that clear communication is not compromised in favour of purely ‘nice design’.

Objective Quality in Presentation Design

m62’s Objective Quality Standards take the form of a fixed set of rules that our designers follow when designing slides. Each and every slide we produce is put through quality audit and measured against these Standards. Any deviation from the Standards, which set tolerances for over a hundred specific slide properties, requires a rework before the presentation goes live. The OQS are strictly enforced, but they have nothing to do with the graphics. Instead, they seek to prevent tiny but significant distractions. We need the audience to pay complete attention to the presenter and the slide simultaneously as the presentation is delivered. Anything that looks out of place, untidy or unexpected could provoke a “why is that like that..?” reaction in an audience member and make them disengage for a few seconds – grit in the Vaseline of smooth communication.

Objective Quality Rules

There is common sense behind all of the OQS rules.

• An arrow that points downwards should be animated from top to bottom (e.g. ‘wipe from top’).
• A row of pictures should be aligned and evenly distributed (using PowerPoint’s align and distribute tools, not by eye).
• Graphical objects should adhere to a consistent palette and should not introduce a crazy new colour for no good reason.
• Animations should not be too dramatic, last longer than three seconds or repeat themselves over and over – overenthusiastic animations can be mesmerising at best and irritating at worst.

Slide Titles, an Example

The first thing that usually appears on a slide is the title. We want the audience to read the title quickly and understand it so they can contextualise the information that follows. Therefore we always place our titles on a contrasting bar that wipes from left to right. Contrast is important because we need the text to be clearly legible and we need the audience to understand that this is a title and not part of the explanation. Wiping from left to right is important because that is the direction the eye travels as it reads. Title text (along with any other text) is also determined at an absolute minimum of 24pt – this is the minimum size that we find audiences can read comfortably and quickly in a typical setting. If they have to strain to read it, they might not bother, and if they don’t bother, it’s a waste of time having the text there at all.

Eliminate Distraction in Presentation Design

Arguments about subjective design quality can be a welcome distraction from rehearsing, but they rarely illuminate more than the individual tastes of the observers, and cannot provide much insight into the various tastes among the next audience.

The point is this: when you’re finalising a presentation, design matters just as much as messaging, visualisation and delivery. But the aesthetic aspects of slides will not make or break them. Think about the basics: “Does the slide look tidy? Is everything easy to see/read? Do the right things grab attention at the right time?”

Eliminating distractions in presentation graphics will go a lot further towards keeping your audience engaged than trying to guess their favourite colours.

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Highlighting part of a PowerPoint slide can be useful for directing audience attention.

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