which I don't think should have that bright and that cheerful kind of slides.
And in order to make things brighter people use,
well one thing they use children's faces which I think is excessive.
But secondly they use those bright fills,
which make things much harder to read.
Now what if instead we can take those numbers and make bullets out of numbers.
What if we can create focus points with text?
And in the last line, we do not have a number, but
we can probably concoct something out of what we have.
Maybe we can further improve the composition,
and make something more complex, in terms of those gaps.
And when I say something more complex, it's actually just four words, a circle
and a line, it's really, really easy, and quick thing to do.
It doesn't take all that much time.
Let's take a look at another example.
This is a rather over complicated slide by the US Department
of Transportation actually and
let's try to come to the sort of bare concrete walls in terms of this slide.
Let's remove the background, this background.
Let's make those lines thinner.
Let's remove some of those bright boxes.
Actually let's remove all of these lines, and all of these boxes.
And okay, we've arrived to a situation where there's nothing else left to delete.
I don't know, you might want to delete 90% of this text,
but we're not deleting any text here.
These are rules.
First let's change the typeface to something nicer because equilibrium.
Secondly, let's use a simple grid to arrange things on the page.
Secondly, if we remove the grid we will see that the first column seems very
narrow and the rest is probably way too wide.
Now, with a little trick the first word in the long column is assistance.
What if we can replace this word with something shorter?
Like for example help I know a little trick and we can probably make the rest of
the columns a little narrower so they seem equal.
Once again we trust our eyes and not the row.
And thirdly, we can start to create focus points with, for example numbers.
Big, bright numbers to guide the eye.
And once again, we can use some really simple geometric shapes to improve things.
And I think the difference is rather dramatic.
Much easier on the eyes.
Much more professional look.
Much easier to read.
And this, of course,
is the noble goal of typography to optimize the transfer of information.
So it was said that web design is 95% typography and
I think the same applies to slide design.
I think if you study typography, if you really understand how it works,
it will dramatically improve everything you do in terms of your slides.
This is not about some wild fantasies,
it's mostly about keeping things orderly and following some simple rules.
The book for this week will be The Elements of Style, by Robert Bringhurst.
This is a wonderful book.
On Amazon UK it has a solid five star rating.
This is a great book on typography which I encourage you to read.
Goodbye.