I participated in the survey for the 2017 Design in Tech Report by John Maeda. It is full of interesting facts and figures about the state of design.
One insight that resonated with my is the design education gap. Aspiring designers get zero education in business or engineering when studying for their degree. My presentation design business is the direct result of this.
As I blogged, earlier, the design itself of the document is also interesting. It is a consulting-style deck with lots of information and facts, meant more for reading than a stand up presentation. This is a document format that is probably the most common in business today.
- Some elements are similar to the ones you can use in my presentation app SlideMagic. Grey colors with only one strong accent color. The use of 16:9 to extend slides with a full-text “explanation box”
- Good use of typography: titles, subtitles, text, quotes (the latter surrounded with lots of white space)
- The font is nice and elegant, but will make the document not very readable on old VGA projects and/or monitors. You see in the SlideShare rendering that things start to go wrong. This is the reason I went for a heavier font in SlideMagic.
Anyway, this document is a good reminder to look at when you look at your own PowerPoint doc. Why does yours look bad, and John’s look good?