Just because something has niggling faults doesn’t mean you can’t still love it. Even the most ardent Powerpoint-er would still have a list of annoyances the length of, well, the average presentation.
One of the most commonly raised gripes is that Powerpoint is extremely difficult to design for. The default layouts invite text rather than images, and text never translates well with an audience. This usually combines with a complaint about the average Powerpoint-er having the design sensibilities of a half-hundredweight of deep frozen octopus eggs. The result is a blog-post about choosing fonts or paying for some decent photography.
This isn’t one of those posts.
We have created a beautifully simple and thoughtfully designed Powerpoint template. If you just want to grab it and go, then help yourself.
Grab a beautifully-simple-and-thoughtfully-designed Powerpoint template and Go
If you want to find out what makes it so special, read on.
Powerpoint produces pages. We really shouldn’t lose sight of that simple fact. We call them ‘slides’ because they are meant to be projected onto a screen. However, it is increasingly common to find ‘decks’ are emailed around organisations so that executives can absorb the information more quickly than they would be able to from reading reams of paper written out long-hand. They are documents that encourage a visual shorthand and bulleted lists They are basically pages, though. And over the centuries lots of people have put lots of thought into how pages are laid out and presented. There is a magic in good page layout.
Gutenberg didn’t just invent moveable type and printing as we know it. Along with his acolytes he developed a visual language for the printed page. The language was only taught to those young men apprenticed into the printing and book making businesses. Nobody else needed to know it. Freedom of the press was at that time limited to those who had one. You certainly didn’t need to understand the aesthetics to understand the words.
Here’s a page from a Gutenburg bible.
We could have chosen a page from any of thousands of early printed works. They largely shared the same balance, regardless of the size of the page. The proportions of the red box to the page size were always the same, and lengths ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’ and ‘d’ were always in the same ratio. Outside of the printing world, however, these things weren’t widely known. In fact, the geometry wasn’t well understood at all until the mid 20th Century when printing became available to a wider population.
The so-called “Secret Canon” of page layout was first demonstrated by J. A. van de Graaf (not to be confused with Robert van de Graaff, the American physicist who liked school-children to have crazy hair). Using only a straight edge and a knowledge of geometry he came up with the following construction for facing pages.
There’s a lot going on here. It is explained in greater depth over here. We’ll not detain ourselves further.
Now, while this layout works brilliantly for books, with Powerpoint we have to make certain concessions. The margins in the Van de Graff canon allow the reader to hold the book at the bottom corner of each page while reading. This puts plenty of whitespace underneath the text area. Powerpoint slides typically require a title section. Because the eye is first drawn to the top of an object, it makes sense to put the title at the top of the page. So let’s rotate the page 180°.
We now have space at the top of the page for the title to live. But now we need to place it such that it ties in with the rest of the layout.
Happily, the layout fits beautifully in a 9×9 grid. If we take the same proportions but just focus on the area above the text area we end up with our bog-standard, instantly recognisable two-column slide.
Once we have the two-column slides, we can take the same set of proportions and create single-column slides. Of course, because of the ratios of the margins, we get a large column, which we have aligned to the left and to the right. Here’s how we made the left-aligned slide.
We then used a similar method to create title slides, this time turning our two column construction on its side.
Grab a beautifully-simple-and-thoughtfully-designed Powerpoint template and Go
Nothing spoils the pleasure of making a purchase more than cellophane. Not even receiving the credit card bill.
Producers will tell you that cellophane ensures consistency, provides freshness, reduces damage, and improves security. But cellophane tells a whole panoply of unpleasant stories about the product inside. Where you see consitency, cellophane tells of mediocrity, of being literally run-of-the-mill. Freshness? Hmmm. Cellophane says ‘this has hung around in storage almost all its life’. Improved security? Like the unstealable coat hangers in hotel bedrooms, cellophane treats customers like theives.
Which brings us on to trying to de-cellophane a product, a feat requiring the combined patience of every saint and the digital strength and dexterity of a concert pianist. And once removed, of course, the cellophane itself is simply discarded, with all the incumbent ecological issues.
In truth, the only industry to use cellophane in a way that didn’t detract from the product is Big Tobacco. Consider that in your next product design meeting.