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Last active March 31, 2016 01:43
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The Art of PowerPoint (or how to look like you know what you're doing)
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lightning_talk_toni_rib_outline.md

The Art of PowerPoint

(or how to look like you know what you're doing)

Background

  • Came from aerospace engineering - seen A LOT of really bad presentations (and a few good ones)
  • The following are my personal suggestions based on what I've seen and how I design presentations

Note: Presentation is structured in a "don't do this, do this" two-slide format

Suggestion 1: Use a blank template, not the default template

  • Looks a lot nicer to create your own design; more eye-catching
  • Ensures all your slides don't look the same
  • Template doesn't have very nice text sizes or colors

Suggestion 2: Use colors & indentation instead of bullet points

  • Bullet points are often unnecessary as long as you use indentation or color to separate out lines or paragraphs
  • Catches the reader's eye more
  • People misuse bullet points often for items that aren't actually lists

Suggestion 3: Make sure the text is readable to everyone in the audience

  • There's nothing worse than half your audience being unable to read your slides
  • Often if you're text is too small, it means there's too much and it's too busy
  • If you get a chance before a big presentation, go in ahead of time and put your slides up on the screen and make sure you can read them

Suggestion 4: Don't use sounds or animations

  • There's almost never a reason to use them and they often look childish
  • Detracts from the actual content and distracts your audience
  • Looks a lot like presentations from middle school

Suggestion 5: Too many words/reading your slide

  • Should never read your slides directly
  • Slides are meant to enhance what you are saying, and the users can read, so you don't need to dictate them
  • If you find yourself reading them, you also probably have too much text

Suggestion 6: Unaligned text/images/titles, etc.

  • There are alignment tools in PowerPoint and Keynote...use them!
  • Slides look hastily put together if you don't take the time to align items
  • Makes a slide look much cleaner

Suggestion 7: No quad charts (or dual charts)

  • If you don't know what they are, it's slides that are divided into 2 or 4 parts, where each part is basically it's own slide
  • One slide per slide
  • Makes text difficult to read, overwhelms a viewer
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