This question has been bugging me for years: why does PowerPoint look like PowerPoint and not like a well designed piece of graphics design work. The answer is obvious for poorly designed slides full of bullet points. But still, even when slides are designed by a professional designer (including me), they will not reach the professional and designer look of a good piece of print design.
I have not found the answer yet, but am getting closer (maybe). Especially after reading an enormous amount of books on graphics design and typography, and a renewed interest in graphics used in television productions (Fox is horrible, MTV is good). Here we go (written in random order):
- PowerPoint presentations use over-used fonts. Arial, Verdana, Calibri, it just does not look as good as Helvetica or other print classics
- Presentation design = filling Microsoft’s default bullet template
- PowerPoint presentations are stuck in between text and display sizes. An average presentation sentence is so short that we can put it in bigger characters than a text-size, but still too long to put it in an enormous display font. Fonts are not designed for this twilight zone. (Helvetica is an example)
- Most good PowerPoint designers understand the concept of white space, and use it. However, we still tend to keep margins around the slide very small, making the whole composition look cramped.
- It is tedious to change the leading(the vertical distance between lines of text) in PowerPoint, so we end up using the standard proportion that was designed for small font sizes (and too large for display font sizes)
- Nobody really uses a consistent grid structure slide after slide
- PowerPoint designers hardly break up a text string to play around with a sentence’s typography. Lower part of the sentence, color part of the sentence, flip parts of the sentence. For example: if you want to visualize squeezed, you could pick a cliche stock image of a squished orange, or your could crush the typography of the word “squeezed” in between 2 forces.
- Presentation designers pick images that are too powerful, overwhelming, creating a constant barrage of inconsistent visuals with too much going on. Look at a quality piece of print: calmer images, with consistent colors, more white space, more coherent.
- We use too much color. Quality graphics design often has muted colors, with a few bright accents. Presentation designers cannot resist the urge to use the full spectrum of colors forcefully on every slide in the presentation
- Presenting like Steve Jobs is making your presentation white on black
- Images always have the standard rectangular shape, roughly the same as the screen aspect ratio. Why not use very narrow images, round ones? Something different
- Presentation designers mostly use text size to emphasize what text is important, and what text is less. Subtle color differences that are so important in print graphics design are not used
- Text sizes should always be the maximum possible. Cutting words is great, but why not use the extra space to create more white space on the slide, instead of filling it all up with a bigger text size?
- Too much symmetry. Most objects are still centered in the page.
- Not used to mixing fonts (partly because of the text/display size twilight zone). Good graphics design uses a few on a page to give interesting contrast. Presentation designers use one (usually).
- The limitations of the 4:3 and 16:9 screen, we presentation designers have to do without the vertical dimension that a poster designer can leverage
- The one-distance-has-to-fit-all situation. When you look at a poster you can view it from a distance and see the big characters and shapes, intrigued, you can come closer to read the details in the fine print. No such thing in PowerPoint. You sit where you sit, in a fixed distance from the screen.
- Presentation designers always hold back and never go to the creative edge a poster designer would go. We have seen too many bar/column/pie charts, bullet point lists, boxes and arrows. It is hard to leave the classical slide compositions behind, and to come up with something daring and new (for 20 slides in the deck).
Continuing my journey into the world of graphics design.
15 comments
That being said I did learn a little trick on this project. The client only wanted a few of the slides to be editable, everything else they wanted locked down so that it would retain a professional look..ie the sales dogg wouldn't add Comic Sans.
The trick, we designed everything in InDesign then copy and pasted it over. In PPT I put in a background, a headline that they could change, everything else was pasted in as blocks from inDesign.
Apparently it brings it in as a PDF. Now of course the file size was large but we just delivered them on a thumbdrive in the end. The only other issue was compatibility, I think it broke if you opened in PPT 2000...but come on, that was 11 years ago.
E.g: Inconsistent visuals are not a powerpoint problem, but lack of communication competency. Screen resolution and aspect ratio however do force a designers hand and lack of kerning features really does limit your potential to create convincing designs.
The differences between print and powerpoint design that are systemic are the culprits one cannot get around, but if we understand those differences there might be ways we can address them to create more compelling powerpoint design still.
One caveat, though: because we are using different media (just arguing print vs projector based here) and different distribution channels for our media it would be folly to try and emulate every practice from one medium in the other.
Lastly, I want to point out that media don't merely consist of their respective functional constraints in transmitting meaning, but also to a large extend are governed by the expectations and conventions that users have acquired using them. With users only recently and slowly realizing that presentations and visual aids are media in their own right, it is not too surprising that there are no design conventions in place we could rely on, as we have come to expect from print design.
(Offtopic nitpicking: I think the vertical distance between lines is called leading, from the metal blocks used in typesetting, not kerning.)
The amount of time I spend in PowerPoint might make me hyper-critical, but when I see a deck where all the slide backgrounds use the black-to-grey gradient and Reflections are applied to all the graphics, I cringe.
Although it might compromise the value of style consistency, as the poster-boy for effective product presentations, I'd love to see Steve Jobs (and his staff) start adapting some new styles and techniques to inspire "the public" to move beyond the black/white template.
I encourage you to use more creative fonts when the deck's style and personality requires it. The result will be awsome!
However, if the user knows little about design ("I know it when I see it...") AND has not organized their thinking and content in a logical and compelling structure ("Thank you, Ms. Minto"), how can we expect quality.
Once after I gave a presentation using Prezi,I had an audience member congratulate on my mastery of PowerPoint. LOL
Here's a link to one of those decks which doesn't look too PowerPointish:
Science: An lntellectual Adventure
It was a lot of fun to create ;-)
I've also inquired ahead what version of Powerpoint would be on the presentation machine, and the response is, "It's Powerpoint. What more would anyone need to know?"
These days, I insist on using my own laptop.