Posts Tagged ‘ Slide design ’

Using Images

There is a right way and a wrong way to present using images. The first thing to know is randomly taking images from the internet is not only unprofessional, but in most cases illegal. Most images that you find on the internet are copyright protected and if your presentation is recorded or published online anywhere you could find yourself owing the owner of those images a lot of money. Best advise; don’t do it.

Secondly, most images from he internet are of poor quality and really do not help to make your presentation look professional.

There are many places where you can obtain good quality images, legally, that are free. The best place is Flickr. Flickr has a category called “creative commons” and what this essentially means is that the images are made available by the owner for you to use for non-profit purposes. Non-profit purposes means they cannot be used in product materials where the intention is to sell something, or in a book or magazine article where your direct purpose is to make a profit. However, if you want to use the images in your presentation, then generally this will be OK as long as you make sure that you credit the owner for the image in your presentation.

How To Use Images

Once you have selected your images, just randomly placing the images in your slide is unlikely to have the impact you desire. As will all things design there is a right way and a wrong way to make your point. Let’s look at an example:

Screen shot 2010-01-25 at 14.32.39.png

In this example, the image has a white background, but the slide has a graduated black to grey background. This is a common error many presenters make. To give this image more impact you could change the background to white and resize the image to fit the slide.

There is also another problem with this image. The main speaker is facing away from the words so your eyes are drawn away from the words. Try to make sure that the main person in the image is facing the words to give them greater impact.

Screen shot 2010-01-25 at 14.34.09.png

Now the image takes centre stage and the impact of the slide is greater. “a picture paints a thousand words” and it our job as presenters to make those pictures paint those words.

A word of warning here…. If you have a low quality image, then resizing to fit your slide could distort the image and this looks very bad. So when it comes to using images, search for good quality images that will allow for some resizing.

In his blog, Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds shows some excellent sample slides on other ways you can or cannot use images. Click here to view

Personally, I like images where there is a lot of white space for text. Here is a sample slide where there is plenty of space for text.

Screen shot 2010-01-25 at 14.52.00.png

In this slide you can see there is a lot of free space on the right side of the image to place some text or words. The slide is not busy, or cluttered and it makes for a nice, clean, calm image.

So, next time you set about creating your presentation, remember, the images you use will make a huge difference to the professionalism of your presentation.

2010
01/25
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Better Slide Design

One of the biggest mistakes a presenter can make is in the planning stage.

After sitting down and writing a great outline, a great story, and gathering all the right images and data, the presenter then opens up his or her Powerpoint programme. Then without thinking, just starts writing their slides. No thought about colour schemes, fonts or layout.

One thing you need to know when you present to an English speaking audience, is that the very first few slides will determine whether you are able to keep your audience listening, or whether they will just go to sleep.

Designing your slides is a very important part of planning your presentation. Standard colours like a medium blue background is a definite no no, so is white. Standard fonts such as Times New Roman and Arial are also a definite no no. Your computer comes with a selection of fonts, and if you do not like the alternatives, you can download some free fonts from 1001 Free Fonts so use them.

Screen shot 2009-12-18 at 오후 3.05.49

The above slide is an example of a slide that has no thought given to the design, or for the audience. It has a very boring blue background, with a standard font (arial) It also has the company’s logo placed at the bottom, which just does not go very well with the background.

Together with the use of bullet points, this slide is not only bad, it is also guaranteed to have your audience sleeping within the first 3 minutes.

Screen shot 2009-12-18 at 오후 3.06.02

Here is an example of a much better slide. There are no bullet points, the background is interesting, and the font used is Helvetica. It also makes use of “blank space” (sometimes called “white space”) It gives the same information as the previous slide, but it does so in a much more interesting way. You could also add a little animation to the slide by moving the timeline forward as you speak.

Screen shot 2009-12-18 at 오후 3.06.09

This slide is a very common slide in most presentations. What is does is tells the audience what you are going to talk about. Whilst telling your audience what you are going to talk about, I personally choose to say this rather than make a slide for it. However, if you choose to put a slide up with what you are going to talk about, the above slide is not the way to do it.

Like the first slide, it is boring. No audience is going to be inspired to stay awake and listen to you with a slide like this.

Screen shot 2009-12-18 at 오후 3.06.17

Here is a much more interesting way to present the topic of your presentation. Again, like the previous example, you could animate it and have the coloured boxes moving forward as you tell you audience what you will be talking about.

Once again, this slide uses colour to make the slide more interesting. It is not busy and it links very well with the previous slide.

Taking a little time to think about design can be the difference between an outstanding presentation and just another boring presentation.

There are many resources on the internet that can help you with inspiration. One of the best resources for presentation inspiration is slideshare.net It is free and you can spend hours there just hunting around for some great ideas. – Go on have look, and release your creative talents. And remember, when designing your presentation, have fun!!

2009
12/18
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