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I designed the chart below for a sales presentation for an asset manager who is about to go on a roadshow to pitch a new investment fund to potential distribution partners. Yes, you saw that right, I did use a reflection effect.
Colours brighten up your slides and are a great way to group related items together: USA is green, Europe is blue, Asia is purple for example.
But applying bold colours to big text boxes makes your slides too busy and nervous. Instead, keep those text boxes light grey and add a very narrow colour box attached to it at the left side, almost like a fat line.
White letters on a white background enable you to make a nice slow-reveal slide. I used it for a client in BI (business intelligence) that creates insight by overlapping multiple analyses.
For boxy charts, I find it very convenient to use tables as the basic organising structure. Use big fat lines to separate the cells. In this way, it is easy to add, delete cells, combine, and split them. The Mondriaan look.
Sometimes, the story is just really simple, hence a simple chart.
A client spend a lot of time and effort looking for a solution to a problem, until they discovered it in an unexpected place. The chart below is simple to make: a magnifying glass and different font sizes (and a transform font effect if you want), that is all.
In case you want to use laser beams in your presentation, they are easy to make: red lines, black background and a small dot with a huge red, semi-transparent glow.
This slider chart is a great way to show a comparison between multiple concepts across multiple dimensions. I recently used it for a hedge fund with a new innovative investment process.
UPDATE: this slide concept can now be downloaded from the SlideMagic store
Some readers of my blog have become paranoid to use bullet points in a presentation (a good thing), but there are actually situations where putting 3 short sentences on a page is inevitable, or even a good solution for a slide.
These situations are when you want to express that something has a number of components. Breaking up those 3 advantages and give them one slide each enables you to explain them clearly individually, but the audience loses the overall perspective of how they are related.
In those cases - yes, it happens to the best - I revert to 3 short bullets. But there are a few things you can do to keep things interesting:
Here is a concept to label lots of layers in a circle without bending text, the second image shows with which components the first chart was created.
