“Powerpoint slides are like children: no matter how ugly they are, you’ll think they’re beautiful if they’re yours” — Scott Adams, author of the comic strip “Dilbert”. Due to this cause or another, it’s a huge stress to look at most Powerpoint slides. Depending on the “design” skills of the speaker and audience’s taste slides create different emotions from a slight annoyance to physical sickness. But that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is that instead of improving the presentation such slides confuse the audience, distract it and finally oblige the speaker to explain them rather than being quite self-explanatory. The goal of this course is to change that by equipping learners with a set of tools to create simple, clear and aesthetic slides which improve the presentation of the speaker. The course covers universal design principles, templates, colors, typefaces, slides’ typography, use of photos and pictograms, composition rules and ways to create clear and meaningful charts and diagrams. This course is not a PowerPoint fundamentals course. You should have a basic knowledge of either Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote software. Don’t meddle, make your slides matter.
Principles in Action
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En provenance du cours de National Research Tomsk State University
Presentation skills: Designing Presentation Slides
97 notes
National Research Tomsk State University
97 notes
Cours 2 sur 4 dans Specialization Presentation Skills: Speechwriting, Slides and Delivery
À partir de la leçon
Part 1: Key principles of design
This week is about key principles of slide design. Non-designers usually can’t tell a good slide from a mediocre one. If they could we wouldn’t have had so many bad slides all around us. So this week we are going to fix this by learning the key principles of slide design.
Rencontrer les enseignants
Alexei KapterevLomonosov MSU BS
Let me give you another example of the same principles in action,
now with English language slide,
which might make things easier to understand for you.
And let's talk about focus first.
So, this is the text.
It's just some text from Wikipedia.
It doesn't matter what it is.
And it's a block of text.
And our job, as designers,
we have to prioritize,
we have to think what's more important, what's less important.
And let's do some really easy job.
This is slightly better than was before.
We've created a header.
This is what slide is about.
It's about a heavy metal band,
British heavy metal band called Motörhead.
I hope I'm pronouncing this right.
And then we've created three subparagraphs.
Right?
This is step one.
Maybe we can dig deeper.
Maybe we can break this huge central paragraph into three separate paragraphs,
and then we will arrive to a slide like this.
Those red numbers are, of course, technical.
I'm just using them to demonstrate to you the hierarchy.
An alternative view on the same slide would be something like this.
This is what we are drawing in our mind's eye.
This is the sort of the inner structure,
the scaffolding of this design.
So, we arrive to this picture,
which is not much of an improvement over what it was before.
But still, I think it is better.
I think it is easier to read than the previous version.
Before that, it was just one block of text.
Now, it has certain structure.
It's easier to understand.
It's easier to navigate.
It is scannable, in a way.
I can just, you know, have a look.
The previous design forced me to read the whole text.
This is scannable.
I can just have a quick look and understand what the slide is about,
which is always a good thing.
Step two, contrast.
Now, I know we all understand this concept intuitively.
We all understand that
big things are important and small things are probably less important,
unless we're talking about banking contracts which is a separate concerns.
So, here's what contrast is all about.
Just make big thing more important and small thing less important.
We also understand that bright things are more important
and gray things are less important.
And pictures are more important than text.
As a rule, pictures draw much more attention compared to text.
People tend to look on pictures first and text second.
So, this is visual communication.
This is what we're trying to do.
We're trying to communicate hierarchy.
Look here first, there second,
and this is the third thing you should be looking at.
So, here's the design.
Let's try to add some contrast here,
and a very obvious thing would be to try to illustrate the header.
We have this name of the band, Motörhead,
and we just google it and we arrive to this design.
And it's a much better-looking slide with the picture.
It's much more attractive,
much more emotional, much more visual.
The text has to become smaller.
But as a rule,
people tend to read the slide with much more attention than slides without pictures.
This is much more motivating, much more encouraging.
And finally, the first piece of the puzzle is about deleting things.
Maybe we can play with this tree.
Maybe.
What is the most,
what is the really most important thing?
And I think this slide is mostly about the band's members.
Point number two, members is the most important thing.
The rest of the information,
founded and the question,
maybe they are of secondary importance.
Maybe we can combine thing number one and thing number three, question and founded,
together and put them somewhere down below,
and lift members up and build the whole slide around members.
This would be the image in our mind's eye.
This is the inner structure,
the new inner structure of the same slide.
And this is what we had before.
And if we remove all the details that we think are unnecessary,
if we make the slide really about members and this question,
whether they are really, you know,
the representative band for the new wave of British metal,
we are gonna arrive to this design.
I know it's a bit of a jump.
But hopefully, as we progress with our course,
you will be finding this more and more logical.
I think if you look at it really closely and try to analyze,
you will have no trouble coming up with this tree structure for this particular slide.
It's very clear that the logo is the thing number one.
Those pictures, three pictures,
are of secondary importance,
and the rest will be number three and number four, etc. etc.
So, this is how design work.
We work with the structure,
then we try to build those contrasts,
and then we try to remove everything that is unnecessary.
Maybe it's still a bit of a mystery for you at the moment,
but I promise that as we progress things will become more and more clear.
So, big question: What can we delete?
What can we remove? And, as always,
we try to remove unnecessary words.
We try to remove excess decoration.
But generally, we try to remove things that people won't
need when they are trying to make a decision.
Design is about trying to improve people's decision in real life,
and we always have to ask the question: What is the decision people ought to
make after they had a look at this particular piece of design?
For example, this is a very famous chart.
19th century infographics by French cartographer,
his name was Charles Minard.
Lots and lots of information,
but what are we really trying to say,
tell to the audience here?
We're trying to tell that Napoleon...
It's about Napoleon's conquest of Russia.
And you can probably see that he didn't lose any battle, right?
It was just, you know, gradual.
It's mostly about the weather and about small skirmishes rather than about,
you know, huge battles.
And maybe if this is an idea that we're trying to communicate,
maybe this will be enough.
Maybe we need to remove everything else and make our design
clearer and make our design clearer, easier to understand.
The third principle is about that.
The London Underground Subway map used to look like this.
It used to show all those, you know, curves.
But then, somebody thought,
"Oh my god, is this really necessary?
Do we need this information in order to make decisions about our daily travels? "
And after a while,
they've arrived to this design,
which is much simpler.
It helps people to make better decisions as far as their daily routes are concerned.
The same thing happened in Moscow.
It used to be like this.
It used to be too much details,
too much data, unnecessary information.
And at some point, somebody, you know,
decide to remove everything which wasn't necessary.
Much more beautiful geometric design,
and I think the same thing we should be striving to
accomplish as far as our slides are concerned.
We should be trying to remove information which is not necessary in
order to make a decision about this or that.
So, the question is,
do they need this bit of information in order to make a good decision?
And the answer is often no.
Therefore, we should be removing stuff.
So, here are the key principles: focus, contrast, unity.
And I will be applying those principles,
those methods of work in my further examples.
And I see you in the next parts of this course. Thank you.
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