“The alternative to good design is always bad design. There is no such thing as no design.”

Adam Judge

I love this quote. Its truth is so obvious, but I think it is easy to dismiss. When i talk to clients – I always talk about an opportunity. When you get in front of your audience (whoever that may be), you have an opportunity to swim or drown. When you don’t invest in design, make no mistakes, your output is desgined….its just it has been designed by yourself. Essentially, we are all designers – just some are better than others. If you are creating PowerPoints on your own, here are 5 areas to focus on if you want to improve your designs.

Hierarchy and scale are one of the elements that make or break your design.

Pretend that you are in an elevator and you see your client…you may have 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 2 minutes. You would naturally create a hierarchy of information – what is the main, point, what is the supporting evidence – how can this be proved, for example. Design is no different.

So, you might make a more important element bigger and bolder than a less important element which might be smaller and fainter. See the example below – here the paper engages the audience with the title, provides a supporting headline, and then tempts the reader to read the smaller detailed text.

If all of the copy was the same size Readers would have had trouble distinguishing where one section stops and another begins, making for a harder to read design that has less impact.

When you want someone to looks at something specific, you point towards it. By positioning lines, shapes or photo elements, we can direct the eye to the most important parts of your design. People are inherently lazy… and they owe you nothing with your design. Hold their hand and lead them.

For example, check out this poster design by Design By Day that uses strong leading lines to first guide the eye toward the main focal point (the title), and then to various rungs of information.

Find shapes and lines within your images and graphic elements and use them to direct the eye in certain ways. The design below by Pony and Dogshow pull the eye towards the logo by the creative use of shapes and photos.

Having a focus in life Is important….in design it is crucial. Remember that the main role of design is communication. Whether you are communicating data, information, feeling or emotion, your design is telling a story – and every story has a beginning and a lead character. So make your sure your design chooses a focal point that tells this in the most efficient, most effective way.

In this design by Mathew Metz, the focus Is the clothes, he literally tells the story in the order that he wants. The yellow circle tells your eyes where to start…we are introduced to a happy beautiful girl the leading lines then draw the eye downwards, gazing over the outfit and finishing with the text, which is seen as being less important.

You see this everywhere – architecture, photography, graphic design, nature, biology. We have been taught that symmetry is good and randomness and chaos is bad. Maybe it is a biological tool for discerning good food from bad or good mates from bad mates.

But what is important is the most successful compositions achieve balance in one of two ways: symmetrically or asymmetrically.

Here’s an example of symmetrical balance. This wedding invitation design by Jennifer Wick uses a symmetrical composition by reflecting the positioning of type and graphic elements. By using symmetry, this design is made elegant, clean, and beautifully balanced.

Another kind of balance and an arguably more common type is asymmetrical balance. Asymmetrical balance is also a fairly self-explanatory term, in that it concerns creating balance without symmetry. The below example by Munchy Potato does this by understanding that the circles are not equal and therefore all have different levels of weight/importance. The artist found balance by placing them as a supporting element. This actually draws more importance to the main circle.

A good technique for mastering asymmetrical balance is to think of each element as having a ‘weight’ to it. Smaller objects might ‘weigh’ less than larger objects, and heavily textured elements might ‘weigh’ more than flatly colored elements. Whatever the case for your design, balance these weighted elements out until you reach an effective equilibrium.

5 years ago I was introduced to the 10/20/30 technique. It was created by a man called Guy Kawasaki who is ‘an American marketing specialist, author, and Silicon Valley venture capitalist.’ – according to Wikipedia. Most notably, he worked alongside Steve Jobs at Apple. This technique or set of rules seems simple – but often the most powerful ideas are.

A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

Guy Kawasaki

How many times have you sat in the room while someone drones through a 60-70 slide deck? Reading the title off of the screen and bombarding you with facts and figures? His strategy was to keep his audiences attention by delivering his message with less content, but with more impact.

1. Problem
2. Your solution
3. Business model
4. Underlying magic/technology
5. Marketing and sales
6. Competition
7. Team
8. Projections and milestones
9. Status and timeline
10. Summary and call to action

What 10 points are most important to your business?

Guy would book in a meeting of 1 hour. But deliver his message in 20 minutes. Ask yourself how much more convinced have you been if someone has an additional 40 minutes to talk to you about a product or sales data or concepts. Instead, he would devote 40 minutes to answer questions and involve his audience. The key to this is having enough faith in what you are selling. If you have a passion for what you are presenting, there is a good chance your clients will also.

On January 28, 1986, the Nasa space shuttle Challenger broke apart just 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members. This tragedy highlighted the potential dangers of PowerPoint, and could be the key to reaching your clients on a deeper level.

It emerged from software company Forethought Inc., a Silicon Valley hothouse, in the 1980s. The program, initially named Presenter, was first released – on the Apple Macintosh – in 1987. Bob Gaskins was the man behind it.

“I knew in the early 80s that there were as many as a billion, a thousand million presentation slides being made per year just in America,” Gaskins says, “but they were all made by hand and almost nobody was using computers to do so.”

Before PowerPoint, people used slides, overhead projectors and acetate films to convey information to groups – but anyone creating a presentation had to send away to get their materials made. It took a long time to do, was difficult to make changes and because it was so expensive, only the most senior people in an organisation got to do it.

The age of the personal computer gave access to everyone in the company to express their ideas in a cost-effective and time-efficient way. Suddenly everyone from the CEO to the mailroom clerk had the opportunity to present their ideas to the company.

A competitive environment has reduced budgets, resulting in lack of time for work to be completed, lack of edcation of how to use powerpoint as a tool, and lack of confidence in ones ideas and story result in 100s of slides being presented, cramming in as much information as possible and overwhelming clients.

To demonstrate this, let’s return to the original story of the Challenger space shuttle. The primary problem that brought down the space shuttle had been included within a slide presentation given to Nasa before the mission. But it was surrounded by so much other information, buried in a stack of bullet points, it was effectively hidden and therefore missed.

The problem was compounded by the fact that the slide in question contained conflicting information. The top line read;

“The lack of a good secondary seal in the field joint is most critical and ways to reduce joint rotation should be incorporated as soon as possible to reduce criticality.”

With the bottom line reading;

“Analysis of existing data indicates that it is safe to continue flying existing design as long as all joints are leak checked* with a 200 psig stabilization . . .”

I was struck by the contradiction: “If it’s ‘most critical,’ how could it be ‘safe to continue flying’?

April 20, 1987, a company released its first iteration of what would become one of the most popularly used programs. I think if you were to poll a population, there wouldn’t be many who would not have come across this program, whether it be through a keynote presentation, using it themselves, a collection of sales data, maybe a pitch deck or even a video (where it is increasingly being used with youtube to annotate peoples videos.

When it was first released, it was created so engineers had a platform whereby they could communicate with the marketing team. Snatched up by Microsoft this program was bundled in with the Microsoft Family, and it wasn’t long before PowerPoint presentations were being used by the early adopter sales manager, or renegade research exec – eager to present their data and insights in a new flash way….this was the era of optimism as technology took over from the school of old using their acetate slides and projectors.

But something happened…flash forward 20 years,  the words “death by PowerPoint” was whispered around the offices and high rises around the world. This humble program was stuck in a really awkward situation between indispensability and relevance in the modern world. Some figures suggest that this all-conquering presentation software is installed on more than a billion computers worldwide and that there may be up to a staggering 30 million PowerPoint presentations created every day.

We have all been in a presentation or keynote, looking at our watches…looking longingly at the door – thinking of whether to go for sushi or subway for lunch. Each slide bringing you closer to a release.

Key contributors to death by PowerPoint include confusing graphics, slides with too much text and presenters whose idea of a good presentation is to read 40 slides out loud.

I would argue that the inability to see powerpoint as just a tool means that we blame the tool and not the workman. The problem is that we have never truly been taught how to use it. When used properly, with the right resources, directed at the right people – I genuinely believe that we can change worlds.

Key to this premise is education. Where do you learn how to use PowerPoint? Who teaches you? What are their aims? What are your aims? I would argue that with the right teacher / or a mind that is accepting of the idea that Powerpoint can do…can transform this program from a stick to be a flaming sword in your armory.

Start with the opportunity….be the intern again, who is presenting his first presentation – look for impact and connection with your audience. The problem with powerpoint is that people don’t recognize the opportunity. A keynote or presentation is not just delivering of information, it is an opportunity to connect with your client or audience and transform their thinking – powerpoint is a great tool that can help with that, but it doesn’t replace your role in the process. Powerpoint is not an extension of you….it is your wingman – it’s your friend. You shouldn’t be reading from it – but it should support some of the points that you say.

Presentations should be fun – go in there with the goal of changing minds – use PowerPoint to highlight your key points – use it to visualise your data, or communicate a feeling – yes (its like art). If you need any advice on how to do this – or would like to hire us to transform your amazing data/content/stories – flick us an email – we are waiting 😀