5-1 Discussion
Discussion Prompt: Find a set of professional guidelines that considers visual design consistency for creating presentations and discuss them. What are the strengths and limitations of the guidelines that you have found, and what other best practices might you suggest based on your experiences as a speaker and an audience member?
I found two sets of best practices that I found myself saving for references. The first is by Nuts and Bolts (found here: https://nutsandboltsspeedtraining.com/powerpoint-tutorials/powerpoint-best-practices-create-consistency-with-formatting-guides/), and describes what I personally consider a crucial tool to implementing visual design consistency: the slide master (Nuts & Bolts).
While I don’t use PowerPoint too often in my professional life, I do use masters in other contexts; I am the editor and Publications Chair for my local Mensa chapter, and one of my responsibilities is to put together the monthly newsletter. I use Scribus to do it (the poor student’s InDesign!), and one of the most powerful features therein is the ability to use a slide master to implement visual design consistency. As a result, I was very excited to find a best practices guide for the same concept in PowerPoint.
Unfortunately, rather than being a best practices guide, this reference was actually much more of a tutorial: it goes into great detail about the steps needed to build master slides and how to use formatting guides with those slide masters. Nowhere, though, does the guide address why we would want to do so, how the audience and the speaker would benefit, or any other form of visual consistency. I have saved it to refer to as I build my presentation for this week’s milestone, but as a “best practices” guide, this left a lot to be desired.
An alternative reference that was much more a collection of actual best practices, courtesy of the National Conference of State Legislatures (found here: http://www.ncsl.org/legislators-staff/legislative-staff/legislative-staff-coordinating-committee/tips-for-making-effective-powerpoint-presentations.aspx). This is a much more comprehensive resource, beginning with, funnily enough, a tip on using the slide master.
Tips for Making Effective PowerPoint Presentations (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2017) presents a comprehensive set of guidelines encompassing everything from typeface to Gestalt principles (though the name “Gestalt” is not used, the concepts are similar) to rhetorical situation to graphics and color. To be honest, though, whoever designed the page would have done well to use some of his or her own guidelines: it comes off as a rambling list of bullet points that are only marginally organized. If the reader has enough patience to sift through it all, there is some very useful information therein… but we already know from our previous readings that most readers don’t actually read; rather, they usually scan content (Ahad & Fauzi, 2014), and so it is quite possible that the reader will only take in a fraction of the information in this list.
The language in the list is also very dated. The date on the page is August 2017, but some of the terminology used certainly belies the year! References to “floppy disks” (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2017, section 1) and CD-ROMs (section 2) are amusing at best, distracting and puzzling (to the younger generations, at least) at worst.
The best practices that I have gleaned from both sources follow:
- Use slide masters to preserve visual design consistency.
- Standardize placement, themes and colors.
- Limit animation, transitions, and effects.
- Avoid text-heavy slides; use plenty of white space and adequate figure–ground contrast, and avoid noise.
- Ensure typeface is legible at a distance, and use an appropriate font size.
Some practices I’d add include:
- Consider the use of the Gutenberg diagram and the Rule of Thirds (Ahad & Fauzi, 2014) to organize the information in the slides, according to the material presented and the audience to whom the material will be presented.
- When presenting data, consider the rhetorical situation carefully before including charts and graphs, and do a number of run-throughs to ensure your chosen method of data display (Kostelnick & Roberts, 2011) will be clear to your audience, and will implement the appropriate tone, level of clarity and ethos desired.
References:
Fauzi, Z. & Ahad, D. (2014, July 12). People Don’t Read, They Scan. Retrieved from Stampede: http://stampede-design.com/blog/people-dont-read-they-scan/#.Vcdv8EWEs4Q
Kostelnick, C. & Roberts, D. R. (2011). Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators. Pearson Education, Inc
National Conference of State Legislatures. (2017, August 8). Tips for Making Effective PowerPoint Presentations. Retrieved from NCSL: http://www.ncsl.org/legislators-staff/legislative-staff/legislative-staff-coordinating-committee/tips-for-making-effective-powerpoint-presentations.aspx