Everyone has suffered through a horrible presentation. There’s a reason that people talk about “death by PowerPoint,” and it almost always relates to the professional design of the slides (or lack thereof).

Use the strategies below to use document design to make sure your slides are polished, professional, and easy to read. 

Apply These Strategies to Your Project

• Use standard margins on all sides of your slides. Never run the text into the edges of the slides.
• Choose a font size that is large enough to read without magnification. Typically, fonts are 24pts or higher is your slides are projected in a meeting room. For slides that will be read solely online, 12pts is a good minimum.
• Avoid fonts in all caps, since they decrease readability. See the LinkedIn Learning video “Avoid All Caps and Underlined Text” (6m 23s) for more information.
• Arrange your text so that it uses flush left, ragged right alignment. See LinkedIn Learning videos “Favor flush-left, ragged-right body text” (4m 14s), and the article “F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content” by Jakob Nielsen.
• Apply the design principles of Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity (CRAP) to improve your design. See CRAP Design Principles.
• Add strong headings for your slides. In Markel & Selber, see “Writing Clear, Informative Headings” in Chapter 9 (pp. 199–201), “Guidelines: Revising Headings” also in Chapter 9 (pp. 201–202). See the LinkedIn Learning video Create Information-Rich Signposts (5m 22s).
• Apply this design advice from the textbook to your draft:
  • Using Color Effectively, on pp. 309–312
  • Preparing Presentation Graphics, on pp. 599–600
  • Characteristics of an Effective Slide, on pp. 600–603
  • TECH TIP: Why and How to Create a Presentation Template, on p. 604
• Use the the Sample PowerPoint Presentation in the textbook, pp. 606–612 (Figure 21.4) as an exemplar of document design. You can follow the practices in that presentation as you design your own.

 

Photo credit: 136/366 - Death by Powerpoint by Paul Hudson on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.