“Powerpoint slides are like children: no matter how ugly they are, you’ll think they’re beautiful if they’re yours” — Scott Adams, author of the comic strip “Dilbert”. Due to this cause or another, it’s a huge stress to look at most Powerpoint slides. Depending on the “design” skills of the speaker and audience’s taste slides create different emotions from a slight annoyance to physical sickness. But that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is that instead of improving the presentation such slides confuse the audience, distract it and finally oblige the speaker to explain them rather than being quite self-explanatory. The goal of this course is to change that by equipping learners with a set of tools to create simple, clear and aesthetic slides which improve the presentation of the speaker. The course covers universal design principles, templates, colors, typefaces, slides’ typography, use of photos and pictograms, composition rules and ways to create clear and meaningful charts and diagrams. This course is not a PowerPoint fundamentals course. You should have a basic knowledge of either Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote software. Don’t meddle, make your slides matter.
Photographs
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From the course by National Research Tomsk State University
Presentation skills: Designing Presentation Slides
64 оценки
National Research Tomsk State University
64 оценки
Course 2 of 4 in the Specialization Presentation Skills: Speechwriting, Slides and Delivery
From the lesson
Part 3: Typography and photographic illustrations
This module is about typography and photographic illustrations. Applying basic typography rules allows making decent looking slides only with text. The same goes to tables. If that’s not enough there are icons — do’s and don’ts of them when you try to spruce up your text-only slides. And finally using photos and vector arts to create really gorgeous stunning slides. Basic rules on how to search them on photo banks, how to combine them with text, when icons should be used instead of photos and vice versa.
Meet the Instructors
Alexei KapterevLomonosov MSU BS
Photographs.
We use photographs when we want to impress the audience, or to prove something to
the audience, with photographs bigger, almost always means better, and
we illustrate headers with photographs, not bullets.
So, when you're searching for photographs on the photo-stock website, or just
Google, please use some of those words that you already have with your header.
Couple examples, this is an illustration, and the proof, we have public
interview rooms, and this is how they look like, we do actually have them.
And another example, the second line of the header includes the word
must, third birthday activities must include a PPT.
So, we want something from the audience, which is a good thing, and
we are trying to influence them with this picture, which I think doesn't quite work,
still a very nice attempt, as far as I'm concerned.
So, a few things about using photographs as illustrations.
Thing number 1, please do not use further stock cliches,
just like with those kinds of pictures, these doesn't quite work as well.
I don't know, I am having really hard times believing that those
people are the actually employees of some actual organization,
I've never seen people doing stuff like this, outside I don't know,
team building exercises, so this is just simply not true.
Secondly, those pictures look really, really cheap, very recently,
Adobe, people behind Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and other tools for
creative professionals, launched a campaign,
an ad campaign for their new foil stock service, and
they used low quality photo stock images to
illustrate the difference between their approach, and well, traditional approach.
And I think thing number one, is is hilarious, but
secondly, well yes you can use those pictures ironically,
but other than that, I don't see any place for
them in a presentation which is created in 2017.
Please use more high quality photographic,
the third problem with photo stock cliche is that, there to direct,
they illustrate directly what it says down there, and
this photograph is a metaphor, it sort of moves the audience into some other spaces,
which I think is ultimately a good thing, this is a work of art, after all.
And, when we are trying to influence the audience emotionally,
our best chances, I think, lie with art and
not with just direct pictorial representations of whatever we are saying.
So, of course we're not children, of course we're not children playing soccer
or football, in other countries, in most countries, actually yeah,
we understand that, but this is a metaphor, and I think this is warm,
this is emotional, and it works, and it influences people on this deep gut level.
Maybe you can go to far in your quest for perfect metaphor for your idea, maybe,
yeah, I don't know, I think the best metaphor is the metaphor,
which everyone except for one person on the room, gets.
Second point, with photos bigger almost always means better.
So, if you have any chance to go from situation, to this situation,
please do so, if you have any chance to go from this situation, to this situation,
or maybe even to this situation, please just so its juicier that way.
We are trying to influence people on some emotional level,
of course this is a manipulation,
of course this picture has nothing to do with 71.4 million metric tons,
but well, I mean presentations, communication, this is how it works.
This is a real life example, if you can go from here to here, please do so,
some people put two, sometimes three, sometimes four images on one slide,
please don't do this, pictures that is photographs deserve better, they
deserve to be big, they have lots and lots of details, and we'll love them for that.
This is where you see that, my God, this is a huge thing, it must cost a fortune,
and this is where budget approval happens, it's huge,
it's big, make it two slides, not one.
Thing number 3, put the picture on top and to the left, don't put it on
the right side of the slide, I think this is a much better composition.
If you want the picture to be in the foreground, and
not in the background, move the header to the lower part of the slide,
yes we encounter readability problems here there’s not enough contrast, but
we will fix this one later.
The easiest way to fix that, would be would be with the shadow,
which doesn't quite work in this particular situation, but
in other situations, it might work, and this is actually pretty much the only
situation where shadow does have a functional meaning,
I mean, this is not a decoration, we're using shadow to improve contrast.
Of course, you can use colored boxes, semi-transparent colored boxes,
if you don't know how to create them, just Google semi-transparent box PowerPoint,
you'll find, you might want to create a separate box for
each line of your text, and nice little touch.
And if you want the picture to be in the background and not in the foreground of
your slide, you might want to place your text in the middle and
create a bright geometrical box or
circle, any other geometrical form would do.
And maybe deem the background desaturated, make it black and
white, or maybe move it even more to the back.
Another trick, which you might want to use,
is to create a semi-transparent box, which is 100%
transparent at the top, and 50% transparent in the bottom,
and overlay your background photograph with a box, and
this will produce a very nice contrast with black and white text.
But overall of course,
my big advice would be avoid photographs with central composition,
and instead use photographs which follow the rule of the thirds,
where you have plenty of space to write on, the photographer
sort of thought about you when he was producing this picture.
Everything that you want to do we can do on this big batch of this blue sky,
you can go crazy with typography, not really recommended.
This is a more or less the ideal photograph to write on,
you can write almost anywhere you want, I know you always cannot see the Powerpoint,
but people get the general idea.
Thing number 4, please be careful with isolated people,
now what I mean by that, is that pictures which are isolated on weight,
they have white or transparent background, and sometimes people put them somewhere
in the middle of the slide, cutting half of the body with that white space.
Well, some people have very vivid imagination like I do sometimes,
and my vivid imagination always produces, this part of the photograph.
Now, if you want to cut other people's limbs, I totally support it, but
please do so with the screen border, and not with white space, and once again,
following the role of the thirds in your composition is probably a good idea,
don't try to be over precise about this, but follow this generally.
This is a real life example, I know, what are they thinking when
young female is screaming in terror, because she is being cut into half,
and slightly changing the composition,
putting the picture on the left hand side of the slide, and
putting it directly above the box which is therefore
no reason at all, we can improve the overall situation, of course
another way to improve the situation would be to make the books smaller.
And thing number 5, using screenshots.
Sometimes people produce screenshots to support whatever they are talking about,
which is really nice, but
another thing which is nice is to show us borders of that screenshots,
because that sometimes is confusing, adding shadows, looks cool, but
also another cool thing would be to make the screenshot bigger, as big as possible,
this is always a problem, people cannot see what is going on there.
Now, using arrows, or geometrical shapes is really nice to highlight
whatever it is you're talking about exactly on this particular screenshot, but
another cool thing would be too zoom in, to make two slides,
one with a overview, second with a close up,
and you can morph one slide into the second one using
a very recent Morph effect in PowerPoint or Magic Move in Keynote.
Let me show you how that looks in Keynote.
Another trick is to create a magnifying glass like this one, for example,
this is really easy.
You need to duplicate the picture, double-click it,
I I'm talking about PowerPoint at the moment.
Picture Format tool bar will open, and then you need to find the Crop button,
and press the little black triangle right next to the Crop button,
it's highlighted with red here.
And then choose Crop to Shape, an oval, for example, and in Keynote,
it's Format, Image, Mask with shape, and then oval.
And that would create a circular cutout, which you can magnify,
add a shadow to it, and then put above the image,
and then deem the image itself, which looks kind of cool.
It say, it does take a bit of time, but I think it's totally worth it,
it's a nice sort of gift wrapping if you will for your screenshot.
So to conclude, ladies and gentlemen, pictures produce much
more retention and impact, and they're also more persuasive compared to text.
So if you have any chance of adding pictures to your presentation,
by all means, please do so.
Thing number two, with vector art and with photographs, bigger is better.
Not so much for the icons,
don't make them too big, but other than that, go full screen if you can.
And, thing number 3 please put pictures at the top, or
on the left side of your slide.
This is where they belong, pictures are eye-catching, and once you catch the eye,
it's only natural to move the eye downwards or to the right.
And that concludes a story about abstract, detailed, and in between illustrations.
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