Design Better PowerPoint

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Design Better PowerPoint Posted: 28 Jun 2010 07:39 PM PDT In my line of work, I find myself constantly producing PowerPoint presentations. Sometimes these are individual slides (like a diagram or case study), sometimes they are templates, & sometimes they are whole, individual presentations. Most of my PowerPoint work is done at my day job where I am an in-house designer, but my freelancing adjust ego occasionally comes across a client needing some presentational pickup. Over the years, I have built & edited hundreds of PowerPoint files. I do know lots of people think PowerPoint is the devil incarnate, but in the corporate world, it is an ubiquitous wicked. To shake a quantity of the negative stereotypes, I apply traditional design principals to make my company & clients look better than the competition. They go to 120 trade shows a year, & they present at every single one. They also use Macromedia's Breeze for hundreds of online demos. Our PowerPoint is often the first thing a feasible customer will see from us, so it is critical (& simple) to make a lovely impression before they even get a brochure. PowerPoint is used by sales man on the planet, with a whole industry of accessories built around the presentation guru / road warrior idea. It is employed for downloadable or live web demos, & it is even used (or abused, depending on your point of view) to pass along copy, ideas & notes between internal team members. With this volume of use, PowerPoint slide design becomes another facet of a company's identity program. From Chuck's Neighborhood PeeCee Warehouse to Apple Computer, the local cafe with the brilliant bagels to Starbucks Coffee, every business benefits from a unique identity, a glance & feel that separates them from competition. The company logo is only a tiny part. Corporate colors, type treatments, illustration styles & repeated graphic elements are all parts of the greater whole. This identity is carried through to stationary, trade show graphics, packaging, marketing & yes, PowerPoint. The application has become so ubiquitous that I think about it part of a greater paradigm shift in mainstream communication. The only issue is that this evolution is delaying communication. Like text messaging or 200-pixel banner ads, the information is compressed to a set of key buzzwords, crippling the message by stripping the skeleton of any meat. Bullet points become rapid-fire metadata. I give you the words "purple" & "fish" -- you figure out what I am trying to say. * Leverage your existing expertise * Recognize fast ROI * Streamlined implementation Is about as significant as: * Parsed cabbage flux capacitor * Disco glitter manifestation * Expressive giraffe BLT Perhaps a hundred years ago those phrases denoted something, but by sheer repetition & abuse, the PowerPoint generation has crushed the meaning like 200,000 people at a Stones concert trampling through a flower garden. In the same way a lovely logo supports a successful identity program, lovely PowerPoint transcends half-assed bullet points & reinforces the speaker -- their character, message & purpose. It doesn't recycle the same, worn out messaging over & over. Not only does it look awesome, lovely PowerPoint hammers home the presenter's message with unique phrasing, fascinating design elements & a sure disregard for the established order bullshit buzz-speak. All the flashy backgrounds, painstaking animations & intense clipart research are for nothing if the message has been gutted from the shell. So while I "design" PowerPoint, I design for the audience because I am focused on how they will react to the information.

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