I don’t know why, but I got wondering what some classic album covers would look like if they were done in bad PowerPoint. Sticky Fingers and The White Album might look like this. It’s ridiculous. of course, which makes me wonder: if we appreciate good design most everywhere else, why do we have such low standards for slide presentations?
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Nothing too terrible here, but the first slide uses typography that’s hard to read and an image that is much more dramatic when it fills the whole canvas to make it feel, you know, crowded.
Sometimes you don’t need or want to use photos. But you don’t want to use a boring PowerPoint template, either.
Here are a couple of slides I made for a small arts organization, using their logo colors and simple shapes.
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The client was the CEO of a major corporation, heading to Europe for a speech about biodiversity.
Here’s the thing about biodiversity, and climate change, and pretty much any current challenge: your audience wants to stay numb. We’ve heard it all before, and the data alone are not going to wake us up. You’re going to have to connect to us emotionally. A powerful image that reinforces the message can help.
Your audience and I would appreciate it if you would refrain from using really cheesy cliche slides.
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My friend Phil sent me this slide last year. So let’s talk about form and structure.
When I bought an old house a number of years ago, I developed an interest in perennial gardens. And for the first few years my gardens looked a bit like this slide. That is to say, they had no form to them. They were more or less random collections of plants I liked.
Then I read a great book called Garden Home, by P. Allen Smith, about the principles of garden design. That’s when I really got that a garden needs “bones” – fences, walls, or hedges that contain the plants and bring focus and order to the space.
Same thing in slide design. Phil’s slide has no structure to it, so I don’t know where to look. There’s nothing holding the words, and no white space to bring some semblance of order. And that’s not even to mention the stucco look and the cryptic “FH Bd o R story” note.
So if we were to keep this as a slide with words, we’d want to bring some structure and focus to it and create a hierarchy so the audience could get the main point quickly.
But we’re not going to do that. Because Phil doesn’t really want to use his slides as crib notes, nor does he want his audience reading the same words he’s speaking. We’re not going to settle for bullet points here at the Slide Clinic.
So what is this slide really about? What’s the one question Phil is posing to his audience? That’s what I tried to get at in the revision.
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Here’s a chart I found about the sad decline of the cod fishery in the North Atlantic. This is one of the most delightfully crazy graphs I’ve ever seen.
It’s followed by a slide I made for the Sustainable Food Lab that tells the same story. In this case, we didn’t need the audience to know how many tons of cod were being caught. Just the feeling of the rapid decline was enough (I had the graph wipe in from left to right).
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The original slide is pretty typical, the kind I see quite often. It contains too much data to read, most of which will probably be discussed by the speaker, anyway. People can’t listen and read at the same time. This slide is too much.
The new slide does a better job of touching people’s hearts as well as their heads. One image, with one critical piece of information, working together to reinforce what the speaker is saying (instead of repeating it).
