Tag: design
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.
Laying out the basic rules of layouts
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
PowerPoint is like a BMW – a great piece of kit that is usually driven by idiots.
I’ve driven a few BMW’s in my life and I’ve always been struck by how appallingly badly other drivers react on simply seeing the badge. The same is true of PowerPoint users. As soon as the projector is fired up, audiences are used to settling in for an hour or two of complete boredom.
PowerPoint suffers so much from over-familiarity. And, while it is packed with features, standing in front of even the most beautifully crafted slide-deck is a limiting experience. Explaining ideas usually works best when is framed around a loose kind of story telling. PowerPoint, though, demands a strict narrative structure with beginning, middle and end tightly connected to each other. Moving between different story elements is extremely clunky and far too many presentations end up stifled. Presenters will often flick back and forth between slides as they clamour for clarity.
Those of us who present for a living are therefore looking for alternatives, a vehicle for our ideas that won’t be maligned for simply existing, and one that allows a more natural flow for explaining ideas. And thankfully there are plenty of alternatives available.
Prezi is a tool that has the design conscious drooling. The swirling visuals and deep dive zooming are enough to pep up even the most jaded 3 day conference crowd. It also gives the speaker the chance to engage in ‘non-linear’ discourse. In other words, while there may be a pre-planned route through a story, Prezi lets you take detours and fly off at tangents before coming back to your main thrust.
Prezi is very easy to use. Spend an hour playing with the tool and even the modestly techno-phobic will be comfortable with the main features. There is also plenty of scope for collaboration with some nice synchronisation between the desktop client and the online hosting service.
That said, while it is visually stunning, there is very little scope for self-expression with colours and fonts. Undoubtedly this will improve over time. As will the need to use highly visible borders around graphics and text to make the animations work. Output comes in the form of a flash file, so don’t expect Prezi on an iPad anytime soon.
Another intriguing PowerPoint alternative is the Visual Understanding Environment or VUE. This is a project from Tufts University and it wears its academic heritage on its sleeve. And there has clearly been a lot of beard-tugging going on in its design. The idea that makes VUE unique is the way it builds layers of information – a ‘mind mapping’ layer to help organise thoughts, a pathways layer to link thoughts together, and finally a presentation layer that pretties everything up in a PowerPoint kind of way.
What VUE lacks in visual immediacy is more than made up for by the flexibility afforded by these layers. Where PowerPoint may require a separate mind mapping tool to organise thoughts and then a labourious process of transcribing ideas into slides, VUE takes care of all of this. And what’s more, the ‘Add Most Relevant Flickr Image’ function takes care of the time consuming picture-editing process that is the heart and soul of a good presentation.
While not as intuitive as PowerPoint or Prezi, VUE is a real breath of fresh air for those looking for a new way of presenting. The concept is fantastic, allowing for linear and non-linear presentations with complete control over look and feel. The layers are strong but flexible and provide a direct link between original ideas and the finished presentation. Output to pdf puts notes and images alongside each other, akin to PowerPoint’s handouts.
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.