12 design commandments for professionally-looking presentations
by Luigi Canali De Rossi
No matter what you have to communicate, or in which corner of the world you are going to do it, the way your presentation looks makes a lasting and influential impression on your audience.
Across different cultures and continents the basic rules of good design and high legibility are the same.
Knowing them, and using them consistently finally brings to the power of your visuals the professional-looking credibility of your true know-how.
1) Work with pale, muted colors.
While you can have fixed colored sections in blue, red, green or other strong colors, you should generally place your body content on a pale, muted background.
The lightest tint of gray will do better than white, saving many of your audience contrast-strained eyes.
Pastel, soft colors, like Siena-tints work wonderfully in all situations as they provide with good contrast with your text, and a soothing, relaxing feeling on the eyes of the viewers.
2) Leave ample margins.
Presentation elements in every slide need sufficient margins around them to "breathe". This is a design principle that you can see applied to any visual communication media. Do not stick your organization logo in a corner letting it touch the borders of your slide. Do not let titles or text come too close to Clip Art elements, photographs or other graphic elements present on the slide. Leave always a discrete but perceptible amount of margin between any two elements (including in this your slide margins).
3) Be consistent.
Invest the extra time and effort required to make your presentation look professionally done by making sure that everything is very consistent. Titles should all be not only in the same font, color and style but also in the same position. If you decide to utilize a visual transition between slides use always the same one.
Keep your color theme constant throughout as well as the basic layout of all of your presentation slides.
4) Be readable.
Make sure your slides are all highly readable. To test this thoroughly without needing to go and rent ahead of time your conference room do the following while sitting in front of your presentation at the computer:
a) Display the presentation full screen, as if you were rehearsing it
b) Move your chair back and away from the monitor about half a meter
c) Squeeze your eyes while keeping the minimum aperture needed to see what is on your screen and try to read
If you can read comfortably what is on the screen, it means that you have selected a good font at an appropriate size. If you cannot read properly, or you have to strain yourself to read the content of your slides you had better go back to your presentation editor tool and improve on font size, and font/background contrast.
5) Strike only when necessary.
Use animation and slide-transition effects sparingly.
Although the temptation to use them everywhere is high you should resist this strongly. Think of visual animated transitions as a visual punctuation language of its own. Would you put exclamation marks at every word? Strike the audience by effectively using visual effects in key areas of your presentation: the opening, the key point, the closing.
6) Use color to communicate.
Utilize color to enhance legibility of your content items and to signify special circumstances. For example it is a good idea to emphasize or surround with "strong" colors areas or items that you want your audience to pay attention to. Different elements in the page can also be colored differently to signal different communication purposes in your presentation (e.g.: problems may be listed in red, while solution may be displayed in blue).
7) Select your fonts scientifically.
Serif fonts like Times New Roman, Garamond, Book Antiqua are effective for long stretches of text. Use them sparingly in presentation slides, as text content should always be short and to the point. Sans-serif fonts work very effectively in presentations. For example Arial is an optimum font for titling, while Verdana is particularly apt at displaying small text as captions, callouts and figures even when set at small sizes.
8) Follow the "rule of seven".
Do not add excessive content to your slides. The popular "rule of seven" can also be applied here and it suggest you not to have bulleted lists with more than 7 elements, not to have tables larger than 7 columns by 7 rows, and not to have lines of texts with more than seven words.
9) Provide reference.
Enrich and make more accessible your presentations by providing clear reference info on the title of the presentation, visible at all times during the presentation. If you can add discretely to this, by using a small font in the lower horizontal area of your slide layout, consider also the provision of your name, company/org, date and slide number/total number of slides.
10) Use quality images.
The selection of your presentation images is essential in giving to viewer an immediate idea of the quality of your work. Do not rely on Microsoft or other free Clip Art or photo libraries. Too many people use them, and the connotation of the images available on those catalogs is "cheap". Get access to a professional CD library or online service from which you can select hundreds of quality images that share at least the same style and quality of execution.
11) Open and close in memorable ways.
Like for real movies, the very opening and closing parts of your presentation are unique opportunities to make a lasting and memorable impression on your audience. By adopting the same techniques utilized in classical old-time movies and cartoons (opening from black with a "box out" or "split horizontal out" animation) you can be certain to impress your audience while projecting a professional image.
12) Balance your layout.
A good presentation design should take into consideration the individual layout of each slide. As a general approach it is wise to look at each slide as if it were a rectangular tray in equilibrium atop a thin pole. By imagining to be looking at the empty slide from the top, you can start to "see" graphic and text elements as weights you are placing onto the slide tray. In this fashion you should gradually develop a sense of what it takes not to have the tray fall off the pole because there is a large image on one side but not a corresponding and counter-balancing "visual" weight on the other side.
Contributed by Luigi Canali De Rossi
MasterView Editor-in-Chief
You can read this article in the original issue of MasterView.
