About a week ago I finished going through the Presentation Skills: Designing Presentation Slides course on Coursera. It proved to be a rather helpful guide for someone fully depraved of the ability to assemble anything that looks good in PowerPoint. If you belong to this kind like I did, I fully recommend the course - that's a moderate investment that offers quick returns. Below are some of the key lessons that I learnt from the course:
- While working on slides I must ensure three things:
- Focus – I should draw the attention of my audience to the most important idea on the slide,
- Contrast – the slide should communicate what is most important and what is the detail of secondary importance,
- Unity – the slide should focus on one thing or idea; I should search for things that can be removed.
- Slides should be functional, look professionally and entertain when possible. Order matters.
- There’s no such thing as “too much text” – rather “too much text out of context”. In other words, if the text is important it can be properly arranged and styled in such a way that the slide will be readable – the problem is usually how we present the text.
- Allowed level of complexity (e.g. of a chart on a slide) depends strongly on the readiness of the audience to perceive it. The size of the audience is a good proxy for that readiness: the larger the audience the less ready it is to try to understand complex stuff.
- Less decoration is good. Adding decoration doesn’t make the slide look good – introducing structure does that. Overall, I should try to remove as much decoration as I can – in particular in tables.
- You can achieve a lot in terms of readability by means of good structure and typography.
- Outside of the branding-related decoration/slide template I may use a maximum of two colors.
- One of which is the color of the main text – black, dark gray or dark blue.
- I may use another color for a couple crucial words or, better, icons and focal points like that
- Max 2-3 words should be bold.
- Bold means more important, italics means less important. Sounds controversial, but visually looks reasonable: bold stands out from the slide, while italics sort of leans to the background.
- Font size should be used to introduce structure, which should communicate importance.
- Photos should be large and few, icons – small and numerous.
- Bullet lists can be arranged horizontally and they look better and more readable this way – because it allows to introduce clearer structure and contrast.
- There are the Align and Distribute tools in PowerPoint – save a lot of time arranging stuff on the slide when building structure.
- Plus a dozen interesting and practical details about typography, colors and visuals on the slides.
