MICROSOFT SHOULD INCLUDE A DISCLAIMER on the presentation templates they offer: “Warning! Using these may be hazardous to your chances.” Actually, the same may be true for most commercially produced templates, and probably 90% of the DIY ones.
It’s not that the “professional” ones are poorly designed (well, some are actually, as you’ll see below). No, it’s that the design gets in the way of the message AND/OR forces you into Bullet Point Hell, because you can’t easily deviate from the templates’ rigid design and you can’t easily include pictures in most of these templates.
Okay, it’s toooo easy to add pictures, and lots of them. But do pictures “work” within most of these designs? NO. There are too many lines and/or graphic elements that compete with the images you really want someone to see. These templates are designed around using bullets, bullets, and more bullets, and that’s where they can be so hazardous for you (since you really should have no more than four to eight bullets — in your entire presentation!).
Here are some examples from Microsoft’s online archives. To help you see the problems, I added a few bits of text to each. Enjoy (?) and I'll catch you at the end.
Not very encouraging, were they? Yet millions of people use these and other templates because it’s EASY. It sucks for the audience, but it’s easy for the presenter. So, what’s a person to do?
If you DON’T have to use a standard corporate template:
1) Start with a BLANK “template”.
2) Find one key image or illustration to use per slide. (iStockphoto.com is a great place to start your search.) Make it BIG, and only add a few words of text to help anchor what the story, at that moment, is about.
3) If you can’t find an image that works, use one or two words as graphic elements. Make them BIG, but put them in gray or a lighter shade of whatever seems appropriate, then put the couple of words you need below or over the BIG word(s).
If you DO have to use a standard corporate template:
1) If it’s not a busy or restrictive design, if there’s lots of white space for you to use, then apply the three steps above.
2) If it IS a busy or restrictive design (or dour or boring), see if you can use just a part of the design (do a screen grab and crop that down). Put that in the lower right corner, so you’re respecting the corporate standards, but then use all that white space to tell your story.
3) If you can’t deviate from what you feel is bad design, consider NOT using PowerPoint to tell your story. If you really need to explain something visually, try using big pieces of poster board with simple graphics. Or hand out diagrams and then walk everyone through them, bit by bit.
And if you want a design standard to use as a reference, look at how Apple presents information, both on their web site and in some of Steve Jobs’s keynotes. That kind of simplicity makes it much easier for an audience to get the message, and makes it much easier for them to stay focused on you.
This is fabulous. Now how do I get this knowledge to all the people abusing my time and my eyes?
Great info.
Posted by: Kay Martin | July 20, 2008 at 06:52 AM