SlideMagic Blog

If your company logo was designed by a professional designer chances are that somewhere in the bottom drawer of the marketing department you can find a complete graphical style guide that goes with it. Usually, it gets only used for commissioning other design work (brochures, web sites, etc.), and hardly any PowerPoint user knows of its existence.

Ask for a copy and use it to inspire your presentation design. See what colours the designer recommends, there might be more than present in the logo. See how pages are laid out. See what fonts and font colours are used. Lots of inspiration.

And yes, the section for the PowerPoint presentations in these style guides is usually pretty bad. Professional designers are not used to working in PowerPoint (an inferior product in their minds). Beautiful design work gets reduced to Arial, heavy top banners and watermarks. So, use the design inspiration of the first pages of the style guide to create your own PowerPoint template that fits it. Hopefully the marketing communications department lets you get away with it.

Some presentation slides live for years, and that might be the reason that we are hesitant to change them, we think: well, the audience will expect this slide.

If nothing about your story has changed, then this is a valid point. If not, it is the wrong approach. The same slide signals no change at all, business as usual. Also, even if you did change its content, the audience will think it is the same slide as last year, and will not notice the different content.

Sometimes, change is good.

One way to draw attention to a specific object on your slide is to apply all of these at the same time: pink colour, bold, italics, underline, big drop shadow, fat circle around it (also pink), big arrow pointing at it. Maybe it will stand out of the clutter on the rest of your slide.

The other way: hide everything else around it. Semi-transparent white shapes are great to dim items on your slide.

The ideal cover image of your presentation (the slide that sits on the projector while the audience walks in) would be one that tells your whole story so perfectly that the presentation itself can be skipped. Many people try to reach this level of perfection by putting up a messy collage of different images, a very tricky visual concept or a highly tacky and cliche stock image that represents the values of the brand: young, healthy, lively, dynamic, and social.

I am less ambitious and usually pick an image that fits the corporate colour scheme of the client and is a preview of an image that I use on a very important slide somewhere inside the presentation. It looks nice and calm when the audience enters, and it will generate that instant recall of that important slide when I show it for the 3rd time on the closing slide.

Copying PowerPoint slides from one presentation to another can have disastrous format implications. Some survival advice.

• When saving/defining a new PowerPoint theme, stick to the suggested colour uses that PowerPoint suggests, i.e., text/background dark should be a dark colour for example. If you move slides across between templates in properly defined colour schemes, the damage will not be that big
• Make sure you copy slides into the file with the desired template and not the other way around. Sometimes this might require you to create a 1-slide presentation in your preferred template, and then copy the 35 other slides into it.
• There is a way to merge PowerPoint slides and keep their original formatting, see an old blog post on the subject.
• At the top left corner of the ribbon is a layout button that opens a drop down menu of slide formats that are present in the master. Use to to correct disasters.

Good luck!

Here is an almost sure recipe to get a good look and feel for a presentation template, even with an Arial font:

• One nice accent colour, but used sparsely for only that: provide an accent
• The other objects in shades of grey, using relatively more light ones than dark ones
• Text in dark grey, not black
• No lines around shapes, let the color (i.e., grey) do the work
• Everything flat: no shadows, no gradients, no reflections
• Black & white images only

Take care when sending Microsoft Office files to outsiders, you might send hidden confidential data with it.

• The presenter notes fields in PowerPoint might contain notes you do not want others to read
• Taking out the data labels with confidential numbers from a data chart does not remove the actual data in the underlying spreadsheet
• The PowerPoint sticky notes links are very small, which is great so they do not obstruct the design of the slide, on the other hand, you might just forget to remove them.

PDF-ing your document will solve most of these issues.

A child find it hard to draw realistic 3D perspectives, because her brain is still developing 3D perception. She draws a house with a front, and a side wall without that wall disappearing towards the horizon. She is not drawing what she sees, she is drawing what she thinks the house looks like. When the drawing is finished, she notices that someone is not right, but she finds it impossible to lay her hand on it what it exactly is.

The same is true for grown ups and graphics design. You see a beautifully designed page, you want to make something similar in PowerPoint and somehow, it does not come out. Why? Because you stuck to your own mental model of a PowerPoint slide (and what you think it should look like) and did not really see how the designer deployed white space, used of grey scales in text rather than blunt black, and set the space between title lines slightly tighter, and was careful not to overdo it with the colours.

Here is an exercise. Take a poster or design that you really like and literally recreate it in PowerPoint (or Keynote) until it looks exactly the same. Now apply that template to your presentation.

Giving your presentation over and over again makes you a better story teller. You need to know your stuff inside out in order to be spontaneous. Pretty much like a musician who can only start to improvise after the basic song can be delivered on auto pilot.

But, some presenters go to the other extreme, they get bored of their own presentation. Energy levels drop, and slides get cut and reduced to generic bullet points that say it all. They say it all to the experienced presentation, they say nothing to the novice audience who hears the story for the first time.

So, how can you freshen up a presentation? Some thoughts

• The most important one: now that you are more confident about your story, you can move toward much more daring and unconventional slides.
• Add stories or anecdotes
• Go for a totally new look and feel (dark background, light text)

But different slides can only do so much. In the end you have to power yourself up to tell that story the way did it the first time to your audience who hears it for the first time.

Most data charts are cluttered with numbers that hide the actual message that you want to convey. So next time, listen to what you actually say when you walk people through the chart. Next, try to design a chart that only contains the numbers and items you spoke about, leave everything else out. It does not matter that you do not have the full comprehensive analysis on the screen, what matters is that your message comes out.