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I’ve just hosted a passionate debate on my blog about the importance of design in a PowerPoint presentation. Some bloggers were adamant that design was a luxury that businesses could not afford. Others couldn’t understand why businesses didn’t accord the same design budget to PowerPoint presentations as they did to their annual reports and brochures.

Here’s my take on it. There are slides that are ugly but work. There are slides that are visually stunning but have zero learning value. In this post I want to:

1. Distinguish between the two aspects of slide design which explain this: graphic design and instructional design

2. Explore how you can implement effective instructional design in your next SlideShare presentation.
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There is a new universal language. It crept in sometime between the advent of the first fax machine and the death of the pager that we wore on our belts.

A quick quiz of most people about the universal language will generate responses like:

• A kiss. It is the global signal of love although there are very few with whom I want to communicate with this language.
• The middle finger. Everyone knows what it means and it is not good to be the recipient of the message so this language carries some unfortunate baggage. It is a language that almost always makes someone feel really bad.
• English. Since most Americans speak no other language, we have imposed this language on the rest of the universe.
• Music. A preferred language by all but now that MySpace has bazillions of bands and artists on it, there are too many dialects of the language. Which is better, Bach or Beastie Boys?
• Food. Before salmonella, South Beach Diet and going vegan, this was a good language. Now it seems cluttered with too many celebrity chefs telling you how to communicate in this language
• Money. Once the banks, the dollar, the stock market and the price of oil recover, this could be a good language again. In the meantime, money is an inconsistent language.

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A few companies have used SlideShare to put up shows about their products and services or about themselves. In many cases these are beginning to show up in web search results too, and are a valuable first point of contact with customers.

Considering that, we thought it would be a good idea to share this list of tips and best practices to market your company effectively using SlideShare.
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Everyday, by some estimates, people deliver roughly 30 million PowerPoint presentations.

And 95 percent of them suck. Then people blame PowerPoint, as if the car caused the accident.

It’s a shame, really, because PowerPoint can be a great visual aid for a presentation. But it’s not the presentation itself. You are.

Below are five tips on how you can use PowerPoint effectively. As audience members we all know in the first few seconds of a speech if the speaker has done his or her homework or if we are merely the latest victims of the dreaded “Death by PowerPoint” syndrome (sometimes also called “Show up and throw up”).

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We are psyched to bring to you The World’s Best Presentation Contest 2008, SlideShare’s attempt to uncover the Global Presentation Superheroes for 2008. This is a sequel to last year’s contest, and it is bigger and better this time.

There are loads on prizes on offer: First prize- MacBook Air, Second prize- Amazon Kindle and Third prize- iPod Nano. There are six categories and each category winner gets an iPod Touch. Then there are honorable mentions, each of which gets a copy of the book, Presentation Zen. And all winners receive certificates from SlideShare. Check out the contest announcer preso below.

Here are the contest rules and the contest entries.

You can enter your presentation in the contest and people around the world will vote on it. Your presentation could be about anything you love or care for. It will have to be put under one of these categories -  Business, Education, Technology, Picture slideshows, Creative/Offbeat & About me. The top voted entries will be nominated to our panel of judges, who will decide the winners. And our judges are the who’s who of the presentation world.

Guy Kawasaki- who does not know him ??  VC, marketing superbrain, presentation guru, entrepreneur, author and most important for us, on the SlideShare advisory board.

Garr Renyolds- presentation design rockstar, author of the blog & book Presentation Zen, popular speaker and consultant.

Nancy Duarte- she runs Duarte Design, a global leader in business presentations and best known for having worked with Nobel Laureate & Former US Presidential candidate Al Gore to develop the presentation that became the Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Bert Decker- head of Decker Communications, author and ace business presentation coach, he has been on NBC’s Today Show many times as their communications expert, often commenting on the Presidential debates.

The contest ends on July 31 and the results will be announced one week later.

Screenshot of the details page below

So what are you waiting for? Rush to enter your preso… this could win you a shining MacBook Air, apart from building up your presentation credentials.

And let us know how you liked the contest, specially its stunning black theme, that Arun (our designer) has labored so hard to create.

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The success of ‘Meet Charlie, What is Enterprise 2.0‘ has been purely accidental. It started with a need to communicate the ideas and practices behind Enterprise 2.0 to the British Computer Society in April 2007.

I wouldn’t say there were any expectations to produce anything other than a standard PowerPoint presentation with me standing at the front delivering the bulk of the content verbally. However, I wanted to produce something which was different, would make people sit up and pay attention, to challenge tradition and most importantly something that would stand up on it’s own without a narrator.

My discovery of SlideShare a few weeks prior to the creation of Meet Charlie had inspired me to abandon everything I thought I knew about PowerPoint. The diverse and rich repository of slide decks helped me to re-evaluate my use of PowerPoint as a communication tool. I’d never seen PowerPoint being used so creatively and effectively. I also hadn’t seen much use of PowerPoint outside of boring meetings accompanied by boring presenters!

I settled on the theme of using a fictional character to illustrate how one might use a collection of web based tools to achieve their goals and structure their work. This worked really well, it brought the subject alive and provided the audience with a character they could instant connect with and compare themselves against. However the most effective attribute of the presentation was the simple, uniform and visually interesting slides. I forced myself to put the minimum amount of words possible on each slide, but enough to inform and guide the audience. It was also important that I kept a natural flow from slide to slide. It’s so distracting when slide decks jump in and out of topics/themes without a natural transition, so I made sure each slide had a natural lead into the next slide.

THE REACTION

I posted the slide deck (with mistakes in the content!) to SlideShare for the sole purpose of allowing the participants of the meeting to view it at their leisure. I was not expecting what happened next. Within hours it was featured on the front page and was clocking up thousands of hits and comments. It took me completely by surprise, after all, Enterprise 2.0 at the time was a very niche topic, yet it was inspiring and entertaining thousands of people around the world. That’s the power of SlideShare right there! One year on and we are well past 100,000 views with many embeds and comments.

THE FRANCHISE

Soon people started to contact me asking if they can translate the slides into their own language. Of course I encouraged it and now we have versions of Meet Charlie in Hebrew, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Italian. I also started to hear from people who wanted to use the slides in their own presentations or at their work. I gladly agreed and began to keep a record of where Charlie was appearing, but it soon became impossible to keep up.

In my own circles at the time, Meet Charlie was being used in the pharmaceutical industry to promote the use of Web 2.0 tools behind the firewall. Another version was soon created, Meet Charlotte, a fictional scientist working in the style of Charlie to enhance her productivity at work. Charlotte and Charlie went on became the official mascot for any Web 2.0 related efforts at the company.

Here’s a list of where I know Charlie and his ‘friends’ have appeared:

• Presented to the board of a handful of fortune 500 companies
• Shown at scientific to technical conferences around the world
• Adapted for use at many companies to promote Enterprise 2.0 related efforts
• Conferences such as Office 2.0, Enterprise 2.0
• In excess of 50 presentations in the style of Meet Charlie posted to SlideShare
• Promotion of company products/services

It’s amazing to think that Charlie has penetrated so many industries and events!
I think it’s great people are taking inspiration from Meet Charlie and I hope it carries on and evolves. I continue to find inspiration and ideas on SlideShare and of course Meet Charlie was inspired by the brilliant Meet Henry.

I doubt very much we would have seen this amount of success without SlideShare.

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Your presentations are important, especially if you are representing your organization to potential clients, the press, or the public. For a high-stakes presentation, a professional designer is usually worth the money. If you pay a professional to design your Web site and printed materials, why not do the same for a PowerPoint presentation?

However, many presentations are less critical. You may not have the money. Or you may need to get the presentation out tonight. For whatever the reason, you may find yourself designing your own presentation. Yet you want it to look good and communicate effectively. How does a non-designer accomplish this task?

I’ve been studying this topic for a while, because I’m not a designer. So I’ve looked, listened, and read a lot. I’ve come up with 5 steps that you can take to create a presentation that will work, even if you’re not a designer. Of course, you can’t reduce design to 5 steps, but if you use them, you’ll see a vast difference in your presentations. Why not try them yourself?

Before you start, keep in mind two overriding principles:

• Keep it simple. The simpler your slides, the better they’ll look.
• Design for your audience. Just as you craft your message for your audience, you should design for them. Think how different a presentation for 4th graders would be from a presentation for college students, accountants, or artists.

1. Create a custom color scheme

Start each presentation by doing something most people have never done - setting a color scheme. Why create a color scheme?

• The default colors look old and tired. PowerPoint 2007 is a little better, but not much.
• Your colors should support your other materials, such as your Web site and printed brochures.
• Your colors should be consistent throughout your presentation and without a color scheme, you’ll often find yourself changing colors of individual objects on slide after slide after slide. That’s a waste of time.

Rather than tell you step-by-step how to create a color scheme (or theme colors in PowerPoint 2007), which you can look up in Help, I’ll explain some ways to find the colors you need. That’s the hard part for non-designers. You’ll need to decide on a main fill color and up to three accent colors.

The first place to go is to your Web site. It’s more likely to be professionally designed. One secret for us non-artistic types is to piggyback on the work of artists.

The second place is your print materials. You may have to ask your graphic designer. If that doesn’t work, you can scan the material, open the resulting file, and use the free Colourificator, one of several programs that lets you point to a color on your screen (with an “eyedropper”) and discover its RGB stats.

You can download detailed instructions for finding the colors on your Web site and print materials, and converting them to the red-green-blue (RGB) format that PowerPoint uses from my Web site, at www.ellenfinkelstein.com/events/colors.html.

Finally, if you’re starting from scratch, use an online tool that generates color schemes. One of those is Color Toy 2.0. Do some research on the psychology of color, that is, how certain colors evoke emotions. You can find a great deal by doing a Web search.

Professional designers often create a sampler slide that contains AutoShapes filled with the custom color scheme, special treatments, design elements (such as images or special curves and shapes), and so on. This is a great way to try out various colors and fills and see what you like and which colors go well together. An extra advantage is that you can simply copy objects from the sampler slide to your other slides. At the end of the authoring process, you can hide the sample slide so that it doesn’t display to your audience. Here’s a simple sample sampler. (Try saying that 5 times fast!)

2. Format the slide master

You use the slide master to format a background (if any), choose fonts, specify text placement, and add images or design elements that will appear on all slides. This step can make or break your presentation’s look.

Let’s start with text. Have you ever noticed how slide titles in some presentations jump from slide to slide, giving you a slight eye strain or headache? This can happen for 3 reasons – avoid them all:

• Moving the title placeholder manually on individual slides. To fix this, display the slide and choose Format> Slide Layout. In the Slide Layout task pane, find the selected layout. Hover the cursor over it, click the down arrow, and choose Reapply Layout. (In PowerPoint 2007, right-click an empty area of the slide and choose Reset Slide.) This tip could save you hours spent adjusting individual placeholders!

  

• By default, titles are usually centered on a slide; and because the titles are different lengths, their left edge constantly changes. Instead, left-justify the titles and they’ll stay in the same place.
• Some titles are 1 line and others are 2 lines. You’ll see the titles jump down when you display a 2-line title after a 1-line title. Instead, specify a bottom vertical justification and that bottom-left corner will stay steady. On the Text box tab of the Format Placeholder dialog box, set the Text Anchor Point to Bottom. (In 2007, use the Text Box category of the Format Shape dialog box and set the Vertical alignment to Bottom.)

Choose a very readable font. Research has shown that sans-serif fonts like Arial, Verdana, and Tahoma are easier to read on-screen, so they’re good options. When you pick a font, stick to it throughout the presentation. Use black or dark blue text against light backgrounds and yellow or white text against dark backgrounds.

Please don’t put your company’s logo on every slide, which is what happens when you put it on the slide master. This will either be annoying, or the audience will soon tune out and ignore it. You wouldn’t put a logo on every page of a printed report, but only on the title page; similarly, leave the logo for the title slide and maybe the last slide.

3. Choose a background

To background or not to background? That is the question. Top designers today are creating slides with plain white (or black) backgrounds rather than the colorful, full-fashioned ones we’re used to. White can be both business-like and artsy; black is definitely artsy.

White is definitely the new blue in presentation backgrounds, for several reasons:

• Brighter LCD projectors mean that you don’t have to turn off the lights in most rooms. With the lights on, white isn’t as glaring as it used to be.
• Web sites usually use a white background and presentation design has followed this trend.
• A plain background enhances the effect of images, which may be overwhelmed by a fancy background.

Don’t use one of those old backgrounds that come with PowerPoint that everyone has seen a million times. And don’t try to create an elaborate background from scratch; we non-artists aren’t very successful with that. Instead, if you feel that you need a background, try a subtle background gradient (Slide 1), simple top and bottom rectangles (Slide 2), or a full-slide photo.

Full-slide photos may not play nicely with text. Remember that your text needs to be very clear against the photo. What to do?

• Reduce the contrast and brightness of the photo, to create a washout (Slide 3)
• Colorize the photo so that it becomes shades of one color. Change the photo to grayscale and cover it with a semi-transparent rectangle of the color you want. (Slide 4)
• Make the text placeholders semi-transparent (Slide 5)
• Use the full photo only on the title slide and then crop it to a sidebar on the left for the rest of the presentation (Slides 6 and 7)

Feel free to override your background whenever you need to use a full-slide photo.

Experiment with plain white and black backgrounds. Once you try these out, you’ll feel liberated from backgrounds! (Slides 8 and 9.)

4. Tell ‘n’ show

Tell ‘n’ show is my term for a concept of slide design in which you use text to clearly tell the audience the point you’re making on the slide, and then use a graphic to show what you’re saying. Cliff Atkinson uses this concept in his well-known book Beyond Bullet Points. Michael Alley does the same for the academic world. (See his article, "Rethinking the Design of Presentation Slides.") Whenever you’re trying to get across a point and help your audience both understand and remember what you’re saying, tell ‘n’ show will help.

To makeover a boring slide into a tell ‘n’ show slide, do the following:

• Rewrite the title so that it actually says something. For example, change "HR Salaries by Division" to "HR salaries up 26-34%."
• Add a graphic that shows what you’re saying. In this example, it would probably be a graph/chart (Slides 10 and 11)

Examples of graphics are photographs, tables, charts, and diagrams. If necessary, divide a slide with several bullets into several individual slides. Take a presentation that is mostly bulleted text, do a tell ‘n’ show makeover, and you’ll be amazed at the difference.

With rare exception, you should use photos, not clip art (line art). Clip art usually appears humorous, and rarely adds to a slide. A nice technique is to find a photo with a solid (usually white) background and make the background transparent. Use the Set Transparent Color button on the Picture toolbar and click the background. (In PowerPoint 2007, choose the Picture Tools Format tab> Adjust group> Recolor drop-down list> Set Transparent Color.) (Slides 12, 13, and 14)

5. Use simple layouts

Non-designers have a great deal of trouble laying out a slide in an appealing manner. Designers use a grid to help them. However, if you don’t want to work with a grid, I have some other suggestions:

• Look at magazine ads, billboards, and brochures for layout ideas, find a couple that you like, and use them.
• Again, keep it simple. An easy layout is a half-slide vertical photo. Crop the photo as necessary and vertically center the text next to it. It always looks good. (Slide 15)

Do a Makeover

All of these techniques are feasible for non-artists. Take your text-heavy, bullet-heavy slides and do a makeover using the principles in this article. You’ll see a definite improvement!

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