Power Point: Design

The late Steve Jobs once said this. "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. "Design is how it works." And so to create a design that works, we need to choose a design that complements and supports the number one most important aspect of your presentation, and that is your message. So when you sit down to write your speech or your presentation, you should be asking yourself these questions. • What is my primary message? • What is my number one goal in delivering this message? • And how do I best visualize this message? And then when you have answers to these questions, then you can begin to think about the design. Designing slides is a lot like cooking for other people. Taste is a personal preference and will depend on the audience. All components should work together to balance out. Just like a recipe. There are situations, • environmental, • social, and • biological factors, that will most certainly influence the design. • First off, there's hierarchy. Hierarchy in design is simply when one design element appears more important in comparison to other elements on the slide. • Space, also known as white space or negative space, refers to the empty places or the separation between elements on the slide. We'll also be talking about similarity and contrast, as well. Now, these two components work closely together to communicate a variety of different relationships. And finally, color. • Color as a design component has a very specific purpose and it is not for decoration, it's for attraction. The Three design pillars: • Audience : communication is about community. The whole point of delivering a talk is to inspire action or change, to communicate an idea to someone. Slides are about those people • Environment : Where you are presenting has a huge impact on slide design. – Lightning, colour of room, quality of projector, how it is being watched. • Message : Design is your message – so don’t make it competitive. 2. Understanding Hierarchy Designers, through size, shape, color, saturation and texture, can manipulate how an onlooker will approach their design. when designing your slides, your slides' visual hierarchy should mirror your content structure. Visually, bullet-ed ready-made layout is damaging to your message, if your message doesn't fit into the structure. This structure communicates something very specific about your content through the position and size. It says that this is the most important piece of information and this is the least important piece of information and these bullets are equal in importance and meaning. So if you find that you are slapping a bunch of bullet points on a slide so you won't forget what you need to say during a meeting or a lecture, you are doing your audience a disservice. There is not a hard, fast rule, like the 1-6-6 Rule. See there's this idea that there should only be one idea per slide, no more than six bullet points per slide, and no more than six words per bullet point. It's totally complete nonsense and not based on anything scientific or proven. It's a made-up rule. But it's a very popular rule. What is based on scientific research though, anytime you overuse one layout or one element, over and over again, like this, people will eventually stop paying attention to what you are showing them. In psychology, this phenomenon is known as habituation, a form of learning in which an organism decreases or ceases to respond to a stimulus after repeated presentations. In web design, this phenomenon is known as banner blindness. When users become accustomed to the website after seeing the banner ads over and over again in the same space, even if the content is different. Use bullet points to communicate, chronological steps, the order of importance, and group membership. Content is king. If I can't fix the content, at least I can break it up in a way that doesn't contradict visually what the content is communicating, and now that the content is broken apart, now I can go in and design each individual slide, in a way that fits each individual message. Just remember, double-check your lists and ask yourself when using bullets, is this information organized chronologically, by importance, or by group membership; if not don’t just use bullet. What is chunking? Chunking, simply put, is where you take something that is long, and break it up and organize it into smaller, bite-sized pieces, 3. Using Space Effectively Space is an important part of any design. Active space, I like to think of as careful considered emptiness. keep 'it' simple. It – Ask what? Don’t over simplify. The personality of space: - Possibilities are endless. That's just a visual cliche. People tend to see and remember or at least notice the final words of lines more. So what does all of this have to do with active and passive space? In the past, we never really had to think too much about space. We didn't have much to work with. But now that presenters are aware that too much text overwhelms viewers and that people can't read and listen at the same time and are pairing down their message, they are now faced with a new problem and that problem is "What do I do with "all of this extra slide space?" the different kinds of space, most namely, passive and active space. There is potential in everything. Asymmetrical designs help create active space on a slide. Space is your friend. It can be used as a shape and a powerful part of your design's message concept of unity in design. Unity happens when all elements in a design, a slide, and a presentation work together to create a cohesive whole. four design principles - We can work to achieve this through: • proximity, - As far as our minds are concerned, when we see two things very close together, we assume that those two objects go together somehow • repetition, - Powerpoint Templates, Themes, and Slide Libraries all help you utilize Repetition . • alignment, and • continuation, View - ) ruler, grids and guides in Alignment Tools -) Home – drawing – Align (objects/) 4. Creating Similarity and Contrast Strategically The need for sameness - when you find you have something important to say, something that you want to stand out, that is when you need to break the pattern. But before you do that, you first have to know how to create similarity. Contrast needs similarity. As such, through similar • colors, • sizes, • shapes, and • other elements – like orientation (direction), texture, you want to create a unified experience for your audience to guide them through the presentation experience so they know what to expect and only strategically surprise them at the right moments. There needs to be difference: There needs to be a balance between consistency and habituation where your audience ceases to really see or respond to your slides or content. It's about finding balance both within a single slide and across all slides within your presentation. But above all, the biggest takeaway from this lesson, it's so important I'm repeating it, so take notes, make sure that what you are choosing to contrast in your slide deck is important to your message. When you contrast something, you are putting a big red circle around it saying this is important, pay attention, remember it. So whatever you do, when you create contrast, make sure what is contrasted is meaningful. Color: Color should attract and not merely be used for decoration. Color should contrast and highlight important details of your message and connect important points on individual slides and across your slides throughout your presentation. If you are lucky, you will be handed a predetermined brand color palette from a company to work with. – Else there are so many choices, and it can get complicated. But for right now, here are the four key points that you need to know about color. Lesson the first, • color should attract just like in nature. Flowers aren't colorful because they are vain. • color is more than just decoration. Color has meaning and should be thought about as other design and elements are. Color should also contain contrast and stand out when necessary. • color should contrast to draw out importance. • Finally, color should connect. Remember choose colour purposefully And like a clown at a formal cocktail party, too many colors will confuse and overwhelm your audience. So, do be restrained in the use of your color palette. So let's begin with the color picker or the eye dropper tool. First, we need to select a shape. Then go up to our drawing tools format tab. Go to Shape Fill. And click on the Eye Dropper tool. Then, all we have to do is hover our mouse over one of the colors that we want. Click once and our shape will pick up the color that we've hovered over Now if you want to plug in a company custom colors, all you've got to do is click on Customize Colors. And enter in those custom colors right here. Jump over to the Custom tab. And there you go, you can enter in the RGB values. Once you have a theme selected those new colors will then appear any time you have a shape fill selected. Or, a text field selected. Avoid colours: First off never mix bright red and bright blue. This combination can be nasty for photosensitive individuals; Likewise you want to avoid red and green, which is the most common form of color blindness. Red text is almost never a good idea. strongly recommend you avoid using the colors in this bar. You can enter in the foreground color and background color to see if your text meets basic accessibility requirements. But overall you want your text to be readable and legible In fact text should be as simple as possible. No weird gradients. No bevels. No trendy hairline fonts and of course, no red text. From the Design tab in the Variance group, lets hover out mouse over the colors area here, and go all the way down to Customize Colors. Here, that will open up the Create New Theme Colors window, where we can plug in our RGB colors that our company gave us, Accent 1, this is your main accent color in PowerPoint. This is the color you want to use most often in PowerPoint, and the color you want your users of your template to use most often. So choose this color wisely. This will be the default color of both lines and shapes. Things get old and you get to reinvent what looks good. And with PowerPoint, we need to be doing a better job than we currently are doing which means never forgetting our core design pillars when starting out to create our slides, audience, environment, and our message. Our designs must tie into those pillars as much as possible throughout our presentation. That is what will help make the presentation truly great.