(4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading...Being a PowerPoint designer and presentation attendee at the same time can be a difficult task, especially when you come across so many bad slides, and you know that these slides could have been so much better! But this approach of looking at someone else’s slides with the eye of a designer is an evolving process. Why? Because what is acceptable today may not work tomorrow. Also, many “rights” end up creating one big “wrong,” as you can see in the slide below!
Figure 1: Many rights make a wrong
So what’s wrong with this slide? Here is a small list:
- First and foremost, this slide uses both icons and pictures to represent the same concept.
The result is that both the picture and the icon are diluted, and we end up with visual chaos. - Secondly, the title of these concepts overlaps smiles in the pictures. To overlap an emotive part of a picture is not acceptable.
- The text adds to the chaos by being placed in the wrong area of the concept boxes.
- Do you see that the top and bottom areas of the concept boxes have a dark gradient box overlapped? This is a great idea, but it does not work for this example! But we can use a variation of this technique to make a difference!
So how can we overcome these challenges? Here are are some thoughts.
1. Remove Dark Gradient Boxes
First, we removed the dark gradient box overlaps to end up with the slide you can see in Figure 2, below. This brings out the color of the concept boxes although it does reduce text readability, and we will take care of the readability aspect soon.
Figure 2: Remove dark gradient boxes
2. Delete Icons
We then got rid of the icons, as shown in Figure 3, below. Icons are typically used to create a visual language, and since this slide already possesses a strong visual language, the icons add no extra value. In fact, they end up diminishing the visual language of the slide. Thus, they need to go!
Figure 3: Delete icons
3. Relocate Titles
Next, we relocated the titles so that they don’t cover the smiling faces within the pictures, as shown in Figure 4, below. Do note that these are no longer center aligned. The default left-align option seems to work better and adds some white space to the picture area.
Figure 4: Relocate titles
4. Re-align Text
Now the remaining text within the concept boxes is essentially placed in a separate text box overlapping the picture. We now aligned this text to the bottom of the pictures, so that more area within the pictures is “uncovered,” as you can see in Figure 5, below. We also reduced the text size slightly. You will notice that the text readability has suffered again, and we will tackle this issue in our next step.
Figure 5: Re-align text
5. Add Dark Gradient Fills
Finally, we added a dark gradient fill to text boxes, as shown in Figure 6, below. This is different from the gradient boxes we deleted earlier in three ways:
- The gradient fills were added to existing text boxes.
- These gradient fills use two colors — one dark color that is set to 0% transparency, and another color that is set to 100% transparency.
- The dark colors match the original color values of the concept box. Thus a light green concept box uses dark green, light blue uses dark blue, and orange uses a darker brownish orange. This brings out the color, whereas black or grey gradients kill the color.
Figure 6: Add dark gradient fills
Related Posts
Slide titles are very important. First of all, they identify a slide. Secondly, they provide structure to your presentation, because anyone who uses P...
Did you receive a PowerPoint presentation, and now you have been asked to make edits to the PowerPoint slides within Google Slides? Why? It could be t...
A reader asked how they could create a custom Theme in PowerPoint and share it with others in their company.Now, creating a theme is a specialized art...
Here's a question I received today: In my deck of slides, I need to have slide numbers 1 to 8 for the first section of slides. I then need the next se...