PPTStar Blog » slide design

Scary Presentations: 10 Ugly PowerPoint Slides

pptstar — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 12:02:43 +0000

Written by Kevin Lerner

10 of the world’s scariest slides and pathetically bad PowerPoint presentations…and a few PowerPoint makeovers and redesigns just in time for Halloween.

Bullets kill. And so do bullet points…sucking the life out of audiences, who stare like zombies into the abyss of the grey and heartless projection screen while a mummy-like speaker recites mind-numbing paragraphs of text. So as the cool autumn winds blow, let’s open the crypt of ten of the world’s scariest presentations…and share a few magical potions to bring them back to life.

#1. Is it a car? Or is it an essay?

This full-screen muted photo of a Lamborghini is cluttered by five sentences of text explaining the definition of a car. The audience doesn’t know whether to look at the car, the text, or the speaker, Or simply look away in fright.

A fundamental fix is to eliminate the text completely- let the speaker talk about it- and create two slides. Slide 1 features a simpler image of the car (a Lamborghini) while the speaker shares a basic definition, as explained in paragraph one. Slide 2 features an illustration of the basic components of the car, as explained in paragraph two.

If the speaker didn’t want to eliminate the text entirely, the photos could be offset to the left, with the text offset on the right.

#2. Strong Brand…Scary Slide!

Hopefully, this company’s business strategy is a lot better than their presentations. In the early days of PowerPoint, someone created this curdling mix of arrows, text and a target to explain how 10 elements could target 6 key audiences.

Granted, this image is nearly 15 years old, created long before the ease of Smart-Art graphics. This was one of my very first slide redesigns…and I saw the immediate need to simplify and minimize. I started by creating a simple template using the company’s brand colors of red and black. In the center, I placed a photo of an actual bullseye. And around the bullseye- instead of angry arrows- I worked in Photoshop to create iconic ovals with superimposed text. The slide’s text and message remained the same.

#3. A Potpourri of Praise

This potpourri of praise may turn a few heads…away! Letters of reference can be helpful in winning a project…but cramming them all one slide is hardly helpful when showcasing success. This construction company’s slide features a mauve/purple gradient background blended with a faded group of schoolgirls. Two recommendation letters in opposite corners are impossible to read…so they’re transcribed in text. But the Times New Roman font is hard to read, even with key words emphasized in yellow. The skinny arrows are meaningless in connecting the letters to the text.

In the redesign of this reference slide, we scanned the actual letters and placed them on two separate pages, angled for depth and improved positioning. A magnified section of the letter showcased the key phrase or message, eliminating the need for manually-entered text.

#4. Bombs bursting in air

This speaker was hell-bent on grabbing his audience’s attention. His stark black background was juxtaposed against a fireworks explosion and an outdated restaurant. The blood red text with yellow shadows made the audience feel as if they were in a McDonald’s war-zone.

Taming this terror is relatively simple. A quick fix is applying a light beige gradient and inserting a photo of a restaurant with an angled picture style effect. The text becomes black and moves to the top of the slide, with keywords emphasized in green.

Another approach to subdue the shriek of the slide is to deviate from the template and filling the background with a full page image of a restaurant interior. Image blur and desaturation effects applied. The message is prominent and dominant, with the critical “Inside the Four Walls” message showcased with a 3D text effect to illustrate depth and dimension.

#5. Toxic Snake. Toxic Slide.

Like the venomous Viper snake, this slide the Veterans In Pursuit of Educational Readiness (VIPER) program for Warren County Community College is also toxic. Teeming with text and pouring over with patriotism, the three key bullets on this slide are little more than a script for the speaker or a handout for the audience.

A refreshing redesign of the slide splits the three bullets into three separate pages. The patriotic flair is conveyed in a subdued, red and blue bottom arc created in Photoshop and set against a sandy-white textured gradient background. The VIPER logo is integrated in the top right, and three square academic images carry the iconic military-academic theme. The three slides each feature a prominent image of a student or service member, providing an ardent amount of breathing space.

#6. As boring as the subject

This insurance company’s gloomy slide might as well feature a decrepit homeless person. The ominous navy background with its heavy black text against a fuzzy pie-chart does little to inspire someone to purchase their plan. The red title sends a subconscious message of warning!

The presentation’s redesign is a breath of fresh air. A light and flowing light green and white background features a green subtle element from the company’s logo. All four major bullets have been converted to iconic graphics featuring bold white text with a black border and shadow.

#7. Scary surgery…and slides

Blood tests and surgery can be frightening…and so is the uninspired layout of this slide. Five unequally-sized rectangles all linked by anemic arrows to an oval in the middle showcase the role of diagnostic testing. The images are busy and hard to see, as are the tiny Arial subheadlines. The flat blue background may put the audience into a trance.

The redesigned PowerPoint slide features five equally sized rounded-rectangles with clear dominant images, defined by Larger-sized subheadlines in Calibri. A transparent clipped PNG graphic of a scientist on the bottom left sends a message for the entire slide of science and medicine. The background is a textured blue angled-line image from Crystal Graphics and edited in Photoshop. A White rectangle block at the top adds contrast and provides space for a concise title and logo.

#8. NSA Security Breach reveals holes in PowerPoint design

There were many harrowing things about the National Security Association PRISM leak – but to Paris-based designer Emiland De Cubber, the most horrible revelation was how awful their PowerPoint design was. Breaking nearly every fundamental rule of presentation design blended pastel colors, tiny type, and overwhelming amounts of information on its plain white background.

DeCubber stepped up and redesigned several PRISM slides. His philanthropic feat was showcased in Fast Company, as well at http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/whats-with-prisms-awful-powerpoint/#ixzz2hA3kvrsl

#9. Simply complex

This PowerPoint slide is the winner of the InFocus 2011 Worst Slide Contest. It features a mix of text, headlines, arrows, schematics, and directions. Normally, a viewer can grasp the core message of a slide, but this complex and convoluted message spooks the audience.

Even if we could even understand what this slide’s core message was about, the slide could be split into at least 3 or 4 separate pages. A textured background, a clean and simple headline and plenty of white space would help simplify the core message and make this presentation more pleasing.

#10. The enemy is…PowerPoint

Featured in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?_r=0) in October 2010, this PowerPoint slide became a catalyst for change in the presentation industry. Designed to portray the complexity of the American military strategy in Kabul, Afghanistan, this scary PowerPoint slide prompted General Stanley McChrystal to wryly remark to laughter and applause, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”

The slide demonstrated the mind-numbing strategy of PowerPoint, encouraging many to think outside the box and create more dynamic and compelling messages.

So the next time you see an ugly presentation, consider these opportunities to rise it from the dead.

Tips for the best PowerPoint presentations

pptstar — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 12:02:39 +0000

By Simon Jones

Simon Jones explains how to create effective slideshows in Microsoft’s market-leading tool – and keep your audience from boredom or nausea

When you’re designing a presentation, it’s tempting to make it as whizzy as possible. After all, PowerPoint offers plenty of fancy features, so shouldn’t you try to use them?

Actually, no – just because you can perform eye-catching tricks doesn’t mean you should. PowerPoint is a great presentation tool, but it’s too easy to go overboard by adding stuff that distracts from the message you’re trying to convey. The general principle when working with PowerPoint is definitely “less is more”.

Let’s take an example. The act of moving from one slide to another is called a transition, and PowerPoint lets you choose from many different effects. Some of them are subtle, but many are so garish that you risk frightening your audience right out of the door. Preview them all, then pick the one that best matches the message you want to convey, your company’s image and the audience that will see the presentation.

Transitions

The Transitions gallery is divided into categories called Subtle, Exciting and Dynamic Content, but you should take these labels with a pinch of salt: some of the “subtle” transitions are anything but, while some of the “exciting” ones are rather dull.

Try to avoid the more slapstick transitions, such as Wind, Airplane, Crush or Origami, which treat your slides as though they’re pieces of cloth, curtains or sheets of paper. The Honeycomb, Glitter and Vortex effects, on the other hand, might look at home on a downmarket TV game show, but not in a business presentation. Simple fades or wipes are understated, less noticeable and let your message stand out.

The transitions in the Dynamic Content category animate only the foreground objects of a slide, leaving the background static. Using these will make your presentation look more professional, since they’ll cover up any black gaps between slides and ensure that – unlike the Push, Cover and Uncover effects – any gradient fills or background pictures remain in the same place from slide to slide.

Check your options

Most transition effects have options, mainly to do with the direction of travel (from the left, from the bottom and so on). You can also change the time taken to effect the transition. Generally speaking, you’ll want transitions to take between half a second and two seconds; each effect has a preset duration that you can change.

You’ll see a preview of each effect when you pick it, but you may need to view it in the context of the whole slideshow to be sure it’s right for you. You can pick one transition effect to cover the whole show by setting it on one slide and clicking Transitions | Timing | Apply To All, or by pressing Alt+K, L.

Alternatively, you can switch to the Slide Sorter view, select all the slides and apply the transition.

If you have intermediate slides that are intended to introduce new sections in your presentation, you may want to use a different transition to indicate that a change of section is underway. You can do this by selecting only those section-heading slides in the Slide Sorter view and applying the alternative transition to them. (Remember: a transition is the effect that takes you into a slide, not out of it.)

The perils of animation

I’ve watched far too many presentations in my time that include an animation such as a spinning coin on a slide that’s supposed to illustrate corporate revenue.

If you were to ask the audience afterwards what the company in question’s current revenue figure was – or even whether it went up or down in the last reporting period – a large proportion of them wouldn’t be able to tell you.

They’d only have seen the spinning coin, which would have completely distracted them from the rest of the slide’s contents, as well as from the speaker’s voice (it’s no coincidence that hypnotists use similar devices).

Animation is usually only effective in a presentation if it’s used subtly to emphasise the data you’re trying to convey.In the above example of corporate revenue reporting, you might want the headline figure in thousands, millions or billions – depending on the size of your company – together with an arrow that points up or down.

Apart from the title, these should be the only elements on the slide, and the animation must support the information you’re trying to impart.

Float In is a good effect for the upward arrow, followed by Fade In for the revenue figure.

This animation will support the message you want to convey (“revenue went up this quarter to £500,000”), and you should speak in sync with the slide being drawn. If you want preamble before you reveal the actual figure, you may want to make the arrow appear after a mouse click, but if there’s no preamble required, make it appear “after previous” (the previous animation being the new slide being drawn).

Always think about the words you’re going to say to accompany each slide, but don’t write them all down on the slide itself. The slide is there to illustrate your presentation; it isn’t the whole presentation. If you write down every word you’re going to say, there’s no point you being there to read them out: the audience will have read them before you’ve said anything – you’ll be adding nothing, and they’ll become bored very quickly. It’s better to make speakers notes that you can refer to while presenting.

The right effect

Animation effects are easy to achieve using the Animation Pane and the Animations tab on the ribbon. Animations are divided into four groups: Entrance, Exit, Emphasis and Motion Path. Entrance animations, which affect the way an item gets onto the screen, are the most commonly used. Emphasis animations can be used to highlight a particular object on the screen, but they should be used sparingly.

Exit animations should be used more rarely still: unless you’re actually talking about removing, deleting or otherwise making something disappear, you don’t need them. It’s usually sufficient to change to the next slide without having all the objects on the current slide fly away, split, fade or bounce off the screen.

Motion paths are perhaps the most abused of the animation effects, since making text or objects fly around the screen is best avoided unless you want to make your audience sick.

A good use of a motion path is when you have objects stacked on top of one another: using a motion path to move the top one out of the way to reveal what’s beneath, or to move the bottom object so it slides out from under the topmost object, can emphasise a process – such as a department being split into two – since the motion reinforces the concept that something new is emerging from something existing.

In PowerPoint 2013, the Animation gallery on the ribbon shows the most common animations in the four groups. However, many more are available from a dialog activated by the “More […] Effects” option at the bottom of the gallery. Several options, which are chosen via the Effects Options button, can be applied to each effect. The Float In effect, for example, includes options to Float Up and Float Down, while the Fly In effect can be set to start from any of the sides or corners of the screen.

Earlier versions of PowerPoint have a more complex Animation gallery, in which all the options are listed separately. The simplification of the Animation gallery for PowerPoint 2013 could be interpreted as an attempt by Microsoft to restrain the overuse of animation effects, but it still includes the most nauseating effects, such as Swivel and Bounce, on the main gallery. These should be banned from all business presentations under pain of a huge fine.

How to do it

To add an animation to an object, click the object to select it, then click to select the effect and option you want from the gallery. If you want more than one animation effect on a single object, click the Add Animation button to add a second or third animation to the object.

The Timing group on the Animations tab of the ribbon lets you decide whether the animation will be started by a mouse click, with the previous animation (that is, they’ll run concurrently), or after the previous animation. It also lets you set the duration of each animation, and the length of any delay before the animation starts. You can also reorder the animations by moving the current one earlier or later in the sequence.

However, these settings are actually easier to control via the Animation Pane (Animations | Advanced Animation | Animation Pane, or Alt+A, C). This shows all the animations on a slide, in the order they’ll play, complete with bars showing how long each effect will last.

You can drag the animation effects up and down this list to reorder them, and drag the start and end points of their bars left and right to change the duration and delay of each one; right-click an effect in the list (or click the down arrow at the right of the row) to change more options, such as the start trigger of the effect. The Animation Pane is great for making adjustments to effects you’ve already applied to a slide, but the Animations tab on the ribbon is the way to add more Animations.

If you want to animate a bar or chart to reveal its values gradually, there are additional options you need to play with. Under Effect Options, you can choose the way the chart animates – as a single object, by series, by category, by element in series or by element in category. If, say, you have a chart of sales by region and quarter, you could make the quarter the series and the region the category, or vice versa – it all depends on how you want to present the data. In any case, the category is what appears along the axis; the series labels appear in the legend.

Data focus

Remember, it’s the data that’s important, not the axes, grid lines and so on. As such, it’s better to have these elements appear with the slide itself and animate the bars afterwards. Do this by expanding the effect in the Animation Pane and deleting the effect from the background element of the chart (which should be first in the list). If you want a pause before revealing a particular bar or set of bars, set the animation for that series or category to start “On Click” rather than “After Previous”.

You’ll need to make sure every element of the chart is legible, even from the back of the room. The font size of the axis labels, legends and other paraphernalia must be large enough to be read easily. Show numbers in thousands, millions or billions as appropriate, with as few decimal places as possible – don’t leave people frantically trying to count zeros to work out how big a number is.

Motion Path animation moves an object around the screen, and appears when you are designing your slide as a dotted line between green and red arrows: the object will start its journey at the green arrow and end it at the red one.

When you’re editing this kind of animation, the object you’re moving is shown semi-transparently at both ends of the path, so you can see what it will be covering or covered by; this helps you line it up properly. This effect must be used carefully, however, since it’s all too easy to make viewers feel queasy by bouncing around objects for no good reason.

Quick presentation rules

• Keep it simple

•Keep the message and its audience in your mind at all times

•Don’t put all the words you want to say on your slides – otherwise, there’s no point in you speaking

• Keep the background simple and consistent

• Don’t put your company logo on every slide – not only is it distracting, but it’s also a waste of space

• Don’t clutter your slides – white space is important, too

• Each slide should concern only one topic to aid the audience’s concentration

• Use only one or two fonts, preferably sans serif ones, since they’re easier to read at large sizes

• Don’t use ALL CAPITALS or underline in the main text – these attributes reduce rather than enhance readability

• Use colour, bold and italics to emphasise important data

• Use SmartArt, diagrams and charts wherever possible to relieve the tedium of endless bullet points

• Use good-quality photographs liberally to illustrate your message

• Don’t be afraid to crop, rotate, flip and recolour photographs as necessary

• Avoid clip-art – it makes a presentation look lightweight and childish

• Make sure everything is big enough to be read from the back of the room

• Stick to one simple transition effect between your slides – with the exception of an alternative effect to mark new sections

• Use animation sparingly, and only to support or emphasise the message

• Don’t use sound effects

• Rehearse what you’re going to say before you present, and write speaker notes to remind you

• Make eye contact with the audience – don’t talk to the wall or the floor

Slide Design 101: The Rule of Thirds

pptstar — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 12:54:55 +0000

By Scott Schwertly on February 5, 2014

I am often asked how one can make slides look more engaging and visually appealing. Today, I want to offer up one simple technique that does not require a background in design, or expertise at programs like Photoshop or Illustrator: the Rule of Thirds.

What is it?

Imagine splitting up your slide into 3 equal parts, both horizontally and vertically. You can then use this grid to place and align your subject matter, optimizing the visual experience. You can apply this approach both to how you view your slides moving forward as well as how you take pictures. It’s a simple technique that separates the professionals from the amateurs.

Here’s how you can use it.

The Horizontal Rule of Thirds

When viewing your slides or camera viewfinder with this “thirds” lens (no pun intended), make sure you always place the eyes of your subject in the upper third. Whether it be a stock photo of a model or an image of your cat, aim to place the eyes in the top row. It makes a remarkable difference. If your subject doesn’t have eyes, you should still aim to place the object in the left, right, top or bottom.

The Vertical Rule of Thirds

When using the rule of thirds vertically, always set objects off to the left or right – never the middle. This will allow you to utilize what designers refer to as whitespace , which is a design element that provides a look of simplicity and a clutter-free environment for the object that is being displayed.

. You’ll see the value right away as you can see below.

Example 1:

Example 2:

These rules are also applicable to text since whitespace and the rule of thirds works with everything.

Give this simple rule a try. You may just look like a professional presentation designer after all.