CRA Inc

20 Feb 06 @ 7:44 pm

Our Approach To Presentation Design

A COLLEAGUE AND I have spent the past few days helping a number of client teams prep for a significant presentation to senior management. We do this from time to time, and when we do our focus is typically on message strategy and credibility. That said, presentation design is a heuristic for both, and we inevitably end up teaching the basics of good v. bad slide design at the same time.

At the firm we take an approach to slide design that is different from traditional corporate practice. Our basic philosophy:

• You are the message: A person can communicate with greater persuasive power than any slide presentation.
• Exception: Pictures that say a thousand words. But they REALLY have to say a thousand words. They should also be high-resolution images, or don’t use them. Garr Reynolds has more to say about this, and he’s right.
• Your slides should “do no harm”: They should never compete with the speaker, and only augment the speaker’s point. As a result they should be lean on text and lean on animation (there’s only one slide animation that has any taste, and it’s the slow fade). Otherwise the audience is paying attention to the slide and not to you.
• Ensure everything is essential: Keep the ink:data ratio as close to 1:1 as possible. This means killing chartjunk and following sound principles of chart and table design. It also means killing all that branding and those logos — the audience knows who you are.

As we explain this philosophy we typically point people to the research of Edward Tufte, which I’ll do now. There’s also much more in the CommLog archives if you search for “PowerPoint.”

Yesterday we spent a lot of time coaching around the physical design of slides so they best reflect our approach. As we did I referred to the “CRA presentation style” more than once, and thought it might be useful to describe the physical setup of our standard PowerPoint template here as an example.

Our PowerPoint template comes in two flavors: White background and dark background. Here’s a shot of each. We use the dark background in dark rooms, and the white background in light rooms (you may click any of these images for a larger view).

We’ve honored the Golden Ratio by matching the proportions of the slide itself to that of the Golden Rectangle (1:1.618). In our case the slides are set to be 10″ wide and 6.18″ high. This “letterbox” look is more interesting, permits more interesting layouts, and looks great when you project.

We use Gill Sans font, our preferred font for headings in documents across the firm (we use Garamond for text). Gill Sans is easy on the eyes, has an interesting feel to it, and holds up well regardless of text size.

When we use images (which we prefer to do over text … they help convey an emotional dimension) they’re always high resolution, and often full screen.

When laying out images and text, we turn on PowerPoint’s “guide” function and set our guides so they reflect the “rule of thirds” and make layout choices based on the guides and their four points of intersection (for more on this go here).

When we DO use bullets, they’re a simple as possible …

So that’s our template setup. We think it helps our on-screen stuff be more effective, which is our goal. We’ve also been inspired by the good taste of Garr Reynolds; go see his stuff. Hope the above is of use.

Technorati Tags: powerpoint, presentations, garr reynolds, information design   

posted in category(s): Coaching Points