Typographic illustration

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En provenance du cours de National Research Tomsk State University

Presentation skills: Designing Presentation Slides

93 notes

National Research Tomsk State University

Presentation skills: Designing Presentation Slides

93 notes

Cours 2 sur 4 dans Specialization Presentation Skills: Speechwriting, Slides and Delivery

“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.

À partir de la leçon

Part 3: Typography and photographic illustrations

This module is about typography and photographic illustrations. Applying basic typography rules allows making decent looking slides only with text. The same goes to tables. If that’s not enough there are icons — do’s and don’ts of them when you try to spruce up your text-only slides. And finally using photos and vector arts to create really gorgeous stunning slides. Basic rules on how to search them on photo banks, how to combine them with text, when icons should be used instead of photos and vice versa.

Advice on typography10:35

Typographical composition3:07

Typographic illustration6:01

Using icons and photographs7:29

Photographs12:22

Rencontrer les enseignants

Alexei Kapterev
Lomonosov MSU BS

When I talk about typographic illustration, I do not talk about those

complex things professional designers and illustrators do.

I also do not talk about those cheesy special effects that

PowerPoint offers to the novice designers.

For God's sake, please do not use them.

When I talk about, well, this is an example of a very

subtle use of the power of typeface, I know this is a very professional work,

which probably took a lot of time to develop, but I think this is, more or

less, an ideal for us, this is what we should be striving to accomplish.

I admire the minimalism of those means of design.

So, suppose we have a rather simple line of text which we could

probably break into two.

We can break into a number and three words.

And what if we can create a focus point out of either words,

or the number, and I think number works better as a focus point.

And I think the end result is actually much more readable,

because it is much more attractive.

People will be compelled to

read it because there's something interesting going on.

This is the power of contrast.

So once again, we do not do this as a form of decoration,

we want to attract attention to improve readability.

And we can make it even better and

brighter using some simple geometric shapes.

And with that little amount of text, readability is not a problem.

Another example, you can take a line of text and give it a certain geometric

shape, probably rectangular, but maybe circular as well, and well,

it looks like a slide, actually, this is me presenting with a slide like this.

It looks, I should say, rather dramatic.

This is a real life example from Hawaii.

And Hawaii is of course a very bright and cheerful place

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.

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