Creating Gorgeous Slides

February 19, 2015

We’ve all seen them: those PowerPoint slides that are boring, uninformative, and don’t actually add anything to a presentation. Prevent yourself from falling into this all-too-common trap and let Anna McEntire, Director of RGS Communications and presentation guru, teach you how to create the most effective PowerPoint, using slides that you submit before the session. Not only will you learn, but you will also be able to make improvements before the end of the day.

Download the Handout

Questions From the Session

Programs Other Than PowerPoint:

I had several questions about my opinions on using programs other than PowerPoint to prepare presentation slides. I’ve used lots of different programs extensively: Keynote, Prezi, InDesign, and Google Slides, and they all have various advantages over PowerPoint. There are lots of great, effective programs to use, as long as you are the only one that will edit, review, collaborate on, or run it.

If, however, anyone else will be involved in its preparation or presentation, I strongly suggest that you stay with PowerPoint as your standard. It will make the collaboration process much easier.

Slides for Lectures:

Two participants talked to me about tips for lecture slide design, as opposed to research presentation slide design, and this has had me thinking. Certainly, many of the main points from this workshop hold true, no matter the situation: Slides should be harmonious with the oral presentation; they benefit from being appealing and enjoyable; and a good font and color scheme could be a long-term time saver.

Although I have more than a decade’s experience working on single research presentations for layperson audiences, I don’t have an evidenced-based approach to designing slides for the best pedagogical outcomes. I’d like to do a little follow up on this over the next months. Hopefully, we can address this for one of our GRTS workshops next year.

Animation:

In the written comments we received, I had a question about when and how it’s appropriate to use animation in PowerPoint presentations. In general, the one time you’d want to make use of animation is for the purpose of progressive disclosure—when you want to make aspects of your slide show up sequentially to be able to build your single idea. In those instances, you’d generally want to just use “appear” or maybe “fade.”

Vector Graphics in PowerPoint:

I had some questions about how I used and manipulated vector images in PowerPoint. Most designers believe that you can only do things like that in Illustrator. To be sure, these tasks are easier in Illustrator, but, to avoid having to toggle back and forth between programs, I try to accomplish the same tasks in PowerPoint whenever possible. The solution for this is to edit points. You can right-click on any shape and edit its points. You can add points, drag them, create Bezier curves, etc. I use this often to add interest or context to charts or graphs.