CREATIVE EDGE · PRESENTATION DESIGN

You can usually tell where one department’s slides end and another’s begin. The fonts change. The blue changes. A pie chart appears with a drop shadow you could park under.

Everybody brought a slide. Nobody brought a deck.

The type buffet is closed

Pick one type family with enough weights to handle titles, body copy, and labels. Add a second face if it has a job. “That’s what the vendor used” is how you end up with a presentation that changes accents every four slides.

Who invited all these colors?

Give your colors roles. One for emphasis, one for supporting information, and enough neutral space to let both do their jobs. If every chart has its own palette, the audience has to relearn what blue means every time you click.

Turn on the guides. I’m begging you.

Run through the deck in Slide Show mode and watch the titles. Do they sit still, or do they hop a little with every click? Use the same margins and alignment guides across layouts. Once you see the title doing a little dance, it’s hard to pay attention to anything else.

The slide has swallowed your notes

A slide someone reads on their own can carry more detail. A slide you’re presenting live has to share the room with you. Put the full explanation in your speaker notes or a leave-behind. If you need to say “I know this is hard to read from the back,” you already know which slide to fix.

Make the borrowed slides look like they belong

One slide can be a photo. The next can be a dense table. They can still look related if the typography, margins, and color choices carry through. When someone sends a slide from another deck, bring the content into one of your layouts. Pasting it as a screenshot is how you end up presenting a small PowerPoint inside a larger PowerPoint.

My last pass is in Slide Sorter. Zoom out until you can barely read the words. The slide from a different universe usually introduces itself.

I hope this gave you something to think about. More from the Steve Blender soon.

To be continued.