Most corporate PowerPoint templates are ugly and take up too much screen real estate. Most corporate PowerPoint templates are designed by professional graphics designers. This does not make sense? I just realized, here is probably why: graphics designers design the template on an empty screen (or Microsoft’s bullet point opening screen). Uh oh, need to fill up that white space with something interesting.
The solution: next time your PowerPoint template is up for renewal, hand the graphics designer a real slide deck and tell her: put this presentation in a new template. My guess is you would get far better results.
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But I would also lay blame on many talented print designers whose design training often flies out of the window the moment they open up PowerPoint: They suddenly seems to forget about color, typography, composition, negative space, etc. Upon seeing this, I've often suggested just approaching slides like billboard design, which occasionally helps.
But to lay further blame on those print designers, I think a lot of them often just don't care—to suggest using real content, to use their design training, to educate themselves and their bosses—because, "it's just PowerPoint." I think this blog post from a print designer nicely sums up the attitude of far too many graphic designers:
I admit I may have gone off a bit harshly on "Homegirl," but I just couldn't resist..
Concerning the lack of free space: I've recently received from a client their corporate ppt master which included (on a regular slide): one title, 2 'overtitles' in smaller font, 2 subtitles (in an even smaller font) and 2 places reserved for subscripts at the bottom. Plus some great-looking graphics flowing down from the logo on the top right down to the bottom. The result: it left me with about 35-40% of the slide space for content. Again, I had to delete it and start from scratch ;-)
Best regards,
Piotr
Oliver
I have done presentations for a company whose template was just as you described, but employees accept what comes from supposed experts and don't realize how a bad template limits space and hinders effectiveness.
I agree with you about your perspectives on designers. They should jump on this opportunity of pushing print-quality PPT into the enterprise.
Hand on heart, after years of doing this for a living and seeing hundreds and hundreds of templates, I've never seen one that made the presentation better than a well designed presentation would do if the presenter had done it themselves from scratch.
(On the other hand I've seen some templates used to avoid the crap presenter putting 12 point Times Roman text up on the screens! :) )
Sharing in your pain,