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Из курса от партнера National Research Tomsk State University

Presentation skills: Designing Presentation Slides

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National Research Tomsk State University

Presentation skills: Designing Presentation Slides

123 оценки

Курс 2 из 4 — Specialization Presentation Skills: Speechwriting, Slides and Delivery

“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.

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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.

Advice on typography10:35

Typographical composition3:07

Typographic illustration6:01

Using icons and photographs7:29

Photographs12:22

Познакомьтесь с преподавателями

Alexei Kapterev
Lomonosov MSU BS

Hello.

Welcome to part 3, which is about typography, about designing with type.

And, first things first,

let's begin with a discussion about hierarchy and contrasts.

Now I'm going to start with a rather provocative, I think,

statement that there is no such thing as too much text.

Well, maybe sometimes there is.

But most of the time when people say, it's too much text,

what they mean is actually there's too much monotony.

Or maybe there's not enough white space.

Or maybe that the margins are not wide enough.

And these are all typographical problems that could be fixed.

I promise that you can actually have a lot of text on a page without it

looking like it's too much text.

This is what typography is all about.

Now, couple of centuries ago, this is what the newspaper looked like.

Which is, of course,

too much text and contemporary newspapers do not look like this.

And it's not like they have any less text, but they have much more

white space and this is what contemporary design is all about.

It's about scanability rather than readability.

We do not design for reading anymore, instead we design for scanning.

We provide people with various visual cues for them to orient on a page.

And actually choose what to read without reading everything.

Before that was, you either read everything or nothing.

Now, the goal of designers is to provide the reader with a choice.

This is how people read, they began reading the paragraph and

down they drop it all together and jump to the next paragraph or

to the next bullet point etc., etc.

So what we are trying to do is, we are trying to optimize the page for

jumpability, if you will.

We're trying to create this visual hierarchy saying that, okay,

these are the crucial points you absolutely have to read.

And those things are optional, and if you don't want to read them,

if you don't have enough time, well okay, you don't have to.

So this is what people traditionally call too much text and

I will try to improve it without deleting anything.

A magician's job, if you will.

Thing number one, let us create the second black point.

In the previous design, it was just one big black dot on a page.

These are two black dots.

One of them is actually quite readable.

I can actually read the header now, which I think is an improvement.

This is a much more, dramatically more, scanable page than it was before.

The second thing, we still have this big black second dot,

and let's break it into four separate things.

And I think this is an improvement as well.

Now, we can jump from one paragraph to another.

Before that we had either all or nothing, now we have a choice.

Now, as long as we're here, please do not just hit enter after the paragraph.

This is not a way to go.

Just use proper dialogue boxes in PowerPoint or maybe Apple Keynote.

This is even easier, they are right there on the right side of the page, typically.

Next, we have four bullets and let's make bullets really, really visible.

The functional meaning of a bullet is to provide a target,

forgive me this military language, for the eye to jump to.

If you don't want to read the whole paragraph, the bullet is the mark.

Okay, I'm big and bright and black and

jump to me, the bullet sort of says.

And they should be separate.

Do not conflate bullets with the rest of the text.

Now, let's decrease a font size so slightly.

And it actually improved readability,

you see more white space actually means better readability.

What I'm going to do next,

I'm going to decrease the font size, just a tiny little bit, let's have a look.

Oops, the readability actually improved even though the text size got smaller.

This is because the contrast between the main bullet text and the header became

better and the contrast between white space and the main body text improved.

Now we have more white space and the page itself looks, well, lighter.

We can additionally increase the contrast by making the header

much bigger and brighter.

And the next stage is, I think absolutely critical, we can work with the three.

We can create an additional logical level.

Before that we had just two logical levels, the header and

the main bullet text for bullets.

Now we have three, we have header, sub-header, and

the main body text, which provides orientation for the reader.

And then we can further increase the contrast.

And this is where we can stop for a second, because I think this is a nice

stopping point, and we can compare it to what it was before.

And I think this is a bit of an improvement.

And we've achieved everything by

just working with contrasts and visual hierarchy.

Now, I don't know if you've noticed but this space,

this space, this space and this space, they're all different.

This is the space between two lines, this is between two paragraphs,

this is between the header and the main body text.

And this is between the main body text and the screen border,

something we used to call margin when we had printed page.

And this is what visual hierarchy is all about,

it's about increasing the amount of space between elements.

This is how we communicate meaning.

This is how we communicate importance of different things on a page.

And this is how we apply our principle.

Focus, we work with the tree first.

We ask ourselves, what's more important, what's the second most important,

what's the third most important?

Then we create those contrasts between headers, sub-headers and main body text.

And, well, here we have almost nothing to delete,

so this part doesn't quite work,

but the hierarchy and contrasts are key to this part.

Thank you.

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