Last week, one of my coworkers watched Nolan Haims’s webinar entitled “In the Trenches: Real World Solutions to Corporate Presentation Challenges.” Like me, my coworker is not a designer but is interested in constructing compelling presentations. She thought this was one of the most valuable Webinars she has ever seen and urged me to watch it.
While it starts a little slow (as Webinars do), there is massive value in Nolan’s presentation. Since there is a lot in there that is for professional designers, here is what I extracted for the rest of us:
- Text:
- Use standard fonts (see: http://2013.presentitude.com/fonts/)
- Jazz up standard (vertical list of bullets) by “chunking” them into columns (note: can use multiple text boxes or column feature in single text box)
- Strive for high contrast (ex: white text on images looks great)
- Images:
- Recolor images from disparate sources to make them feel like they are part of the same family
- Overlay gradient boxes to improve contrast and/or vignettes to improve depth on images (see: http://blog.indezine.com/2012/12/gradient-boxes-and-vignettes-by-nolan.html)
- Where possible use transparent (lossless) PNGs instead of (lossy) JPEGs
- When resizing an image, maintain the aspect ratio. If you have extra space to fill, clone and stretch an unimportant part of the image
- Bing has excellent image search
- Shapes & Icons:
- Use PowerPoint shapes and formatting tools
- Pull PNG logos from quality sources: http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/, Wikipedia
- Use vector icons (.emf format) from sources like: http://www.iconsdb.com/
- Charts
- Use native PowerPoint charts or embed from Excel (rather than pasting as image or as link)