Week 5: Clear on Presentation Design and Layout

Presentation Design and Layout

Make your presentations stand out. Keep your audience awake!

"Matt Asleep" by Jasmic

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasmic/253938958/

Creative Commons License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/deed.en

It's a great feeling to have your audience fall asleep on you!

Presenting information to your audience that you want to STICK is a very difficult concept if you don't know what NOT to do.

Some no-no's when it comes to presentation design and layout:

• Extremely large blocks of text that seem to never end
• Images from anywhere on the internet
• Boring Lists with 6-8 Bullets
• Clutter on your PowerPoint slides
• Bizarre, unprofessional , Gothic fonts 

Some things to focus on when creating a presentation:

• Images with copyright licenses (Creative Commons)
• Easy to read slides
• Simple yet harmonic backgrounds
• Sans Serif fonts
• Your voice is the BEST Audio!
• Simple Pictures or videos that will captivate your audience

     All in all, you need to keep your presentations simple. The more complicated and crowded that your slides become, the harder it will be for your audience to stay involved. Typing one word on a slide and describing its prominence in your own words can help you tremendously instead of posting 6 hard to read graphs and typing a paragraph about the topic. I've always found that using themes already created in PowerPoint can help spice up your presentations dramatically.

     This is extremely important in the business environment because you may have a great idea or topic that needs to be shown to your bosses. Presenting that idea in a PowerPoint with aspects from the "no-no" area of this blog may turn out to be a bad idea. Knowing how to keep your audience interested in your presentation relies directly on how you portray your information in your presentation. After all, who would remember anything you said after reading 10 slides full of text?

While researching this topic, a very interesting resource I used was:

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-slide-design-tips-for-producing-powerful-and-effective-presentations/6117178

This is a 10 tip webpage that explains numerous tips on how to keep your presentations, neat, gorgeous, and effective.

Thanks for reading! I'll see you next week! :)