This post by Rick Altman is the fourth in our recently launched Slide Tips series.
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Sometimes, photos can tell too much

Those of us who came to the presentation community from graphics keep time by the evolution of digital photography. 1995…Kodak introduced the first digital camera in America, an $800 shoebox with 1MP of resolution. 2000…the first time I took a picture of a broken appliance and triumphantly entered Home Depot with my 2MP Olympus and its tiny LCD screen to say “Here, I need to replace this.” 2005…the first time my wife deleted an entire folder of photos and proclaimed she would never buy another digital camera.

These are not unique experiences. In fact, just the opposite – few industries have had such a profound impact on another as digital photography has had on presentations. We all remember our first PowerPoint experience, years before presenters knew how to import photos to their slides. For most of us, it was quite painful.

Therefore, you would think that I would be hailing the integration of photos to slides as a glorious development. Finally, relief from the endless and mind-numbing procession of boring bullet slides!

Well, not so fast.

There is no doubt that modern slide content is more colorful than that of a decade ago, and capable designers have woven incredible visuals into their messages today. However, it is now so easy to bring a photo to a slide, everyone is doing it, often with little regard for the photo’s appropriateness or suitability.

I find myself wishing on occasion that more people would take literally the advice of Bert Decker and just use black slides.

But that is not going to happen, what with every member of western civilization being a potential content creator with his or her digital camera, and more online stock photo libraries available than any one person could ever visit in a lifetime. And I wouldn’t want it to happen – I like photos. I love using meaningful photos in my slides, which in turn brings meaning to my message.

Here are three common issues that face unsuspecting slide designers when they leap into photo integration before they look.

1. Misuse of Contrast

If you were to poll a dozen professional photographers about the qualities of a good photo, it is likely that all of them would include contrast in their lists. Contrast creates energy, vitality, drama, tension and all of those other high-impact nouns that most of us don’t understand, while we nod knowingly anyway.

So it is no surprise that most presentation designers are drawn to photos with good contrast, like the one shown in Slide 1. This modern building taken from a cool angle has a nice edge to it, and it has lots of contrast. It would be a fine photo to integrate into a business-oriented message.

The first impulse of many (and it’s not an altogether bad impulse) is to size up the photo to cover the entire slide and use it as a background. Unfortunately, now the very quality that drew you to the photo will prove hazardous to your career, as the photo completely obscures the text in front of it, as Slide 2 shows. There is too much contrast.

There are all sorts of tricks you could apply to the text to improve its readability, like using a drop shadow or boxing it out, but the fact remains: this photo is too strong to serve as the background. Background images are not supposed to compete with foreground objects; when they do, they punish your audience for paying attention. That’s not good.

You don’t need to throw this photo away – you just need to make it sink into the background more. This is easily accomplished, across any modern version of PowerPoint, with a semi-transparent rectangle, drawn atop the entire photo. Fill it with black or navy, and set its transparency to about 25% to produce the look shown in Slide 3. The feel of the photo remains, but the contrast that destroyed readability has been removed. The tones and the contours are much more even.

There are other ways to accomplish this simple effect (Version 2007 can tint a photo as if it were your image-editing software), but the transparent rectangle is easy, flexible, and works with all versions of the software since XP. With it, you can experiment with layouts like the one in Slide 4, where you cover just a portion of the photo. You might then still face the problem of the photo being too prominent, but it’s worth exploring.

| View | Upload your own

2. Too Specific

The typical dilemma goes something like this. You are creating a set of slides for, say, a life insurance company. You want to project serenity, security, peace of mind, and all of those other qualities that exist together only in the world of advertising.

Slide 1 exudes many of those qualities. Plus, it is well-composed and has good color. And that is precisely its problem: it is too literal. Your audience might wonder who this couple is and if they are supposed to know or recognize the couple. Even if they understand that the photo represents an abstract notion, there is an inherent disconnect because the photo has such strong features. How ironic that this photo would work better if it were a bit muddled.

And that is your task – to muddle this photo, using the Muddle tools that every good image editor has. Slide 2 shows the result of a two-minute venture with Corel PhotoPaint’s Crayon effect. Adobe Photoshop can produce a similar effect with its Rough Pastel and Spatter effects. Removing the sharpness of the photo does nothing to change its evocative quality – it is still clearly a couple enjoying a moment of serenity. But now your audience won’t spend even a second studying the minutiae of it. To integrate the text we used the same transparent rectangle technique, with one twist: The transparency is defined gradually across the black rectangle, from 100% on the left side to just 20% on the right.

Often less is more. Less detail provides more powerful imagery. Let your audience members use their own imagination to tell some of the story.

| View | Upload your own

3. Too Much Focus

We thought it was the perfect photo. In the Editor’s Picks section at photos.com, we found a photo of a man in a hospital room with a caregiver behind him. It was ideal for a slide deck extolling the virtues of the Patient’s Bill of Rights.

Or so we thought.

We knew we might have a contrast issue (and of course, we knew we could solve that—see above), but what we really encountered was a sharpness issue. The photo we chose was perfectly exposed and optimally composed – too much so! The background, including the caregiver, was just too prominent, too sharp, too in-focus. Slide 1 shows the issue all too well, as once again the background takes too much attention away from the text and the patient in the foreground.

Most stock photo houses do not have a section entitled “Poorly Composed” or “Out-Of Focus” — the responsibility of mucking up a perfectly fine shot is yours entirely. Glibness aside, there are many legitimate reasons to add blur to a background, the two chief ones being to bring foreground elements into more prominence and to create a bit of drama. Photography 1A: photos with a long focal length (i.e. much of the photo is in focus) are descriptive; photos with a shallow focal length are dramatic.

With the help of image-editing software like Adobe Photoshop, or Corel’s PhotoPaint or Paint Shop Pro, it’s not terribly difficult to separate the patient and his pillow into a separate layer or object, floating above the background. Once done, you can apply a blur to the background, but not the object. That produces a photo that is much more effective. As Slide 2 shows, now the patient is center-stage, even from his perch on the left edge of the slide, and the text is much more readable against a blurred background.

| View | Upload your own

If you are like most readers and contributors here at SlideShare, you have good ideas to circulate and you have good instincts about the visuals that could contribute to your delivery. Rarely is the case that you find the perfect photo online or take the perfect photo yourself. But with a bit of know-how and creative thinking, you can usually create the perfect scene in which to tell your story.

This post by Geetesh Bajaj is the third in our newly launched Slide Tips series.
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Geetesh Bajaj is based out of Hyderabad, India – and he has been designing presentations for more than a decade now. He’s been a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for 8 years now, and has authored four best-selling books on PowerPoint.

Visit Geetesh’s site at Indezine.com to learn more.

Doing makeovers of slides is such a satisfying task – maybe that is because removing the ugly and replacing it with near perfection is a reward in itself. Over the years, I have understood that the approach required to do any actual makeover is never the same – in the same way as the fingerprints of two humans don’t match, the approaches required to do various makeovers are dissimilar.

Suggesting makeover approaches is a large part of my work – that’s why I find it amusing to hear new schools of thought in the presentation sphere that promise to be a solution to all slide problems. These beliefs range from the no-bullet approach for slides to the total denouncement of slideware. Then there are opinions about keeping things simple and clean – and of providing more visual content. And there’s another school of thought that looks at creating diagrams, charts, and other info-graphic content in a way that’s more effective as is the debate between linear and linked presentations. Each of these approaches is unique and very useful in their own way – and properly applied, each of them may make a difference. But in the same way that a physician will not prescribe a drug for common cold to a patient suffering from body pain, the makeover artist will first examine the slides and then suggest an approach that may use, discard, or combine these approaches.

This brings me to the title of this post: “Every makeover is different”. If there ever was a middle ground that can balance the acceptance levels between purists and procrastinators, and for everyone from geeks to Gods, this is it! In the real world, targets have to be attained, deadlines have to be met, and slides need to be delivered to folks who need to make decisions. It’s such a fascinating world — and even if I did not mention this until now, rest assured that balancing between these approaches is so much fun!

Now that I have made you aware of the approaches, let us look at the amazing diversity in the slide world. Like every person in the world, every slide and every presentation is different. Just look at the content being uploaded to a site like SlideShare, and you’ll know what I am saying. Many of these slide presentations are intended for different audiences – but even if they were created for the same audiences, those audiences would expect slides to look distinctly different based on the content, the venue, the presenter, and the time. And what about where you are presenting – is it something being presented in front of a live audience, or is it a webcast, or are the slides just being emailed? That would make a difference too!

Combine those approaches and the sheer diversity of slides being created, and you can put them together like a warp and weft to create your own makeover strategy. Make a habit of combining the approaches and the differences – and then weave them together in pure harmony to weave the fabric of your makeover – this is so much like evolving dissimilarity to evenness. The result is that you end up with a different, harmonious makeover each time – something so different and individual that even you may not be able to replicate it again.

OK – I agree that I may have input a lot of poetic accord in the disarray – and you are just looking for a set of no-brainer guidelines. So what’s here for you? Try working with these concepts:

1. See your slides, and try to find similarity: See the slides you need to makeover with a completely open mind several times. Always see the slides in sequence, and then go back and forth often. Look for similarities between the slides in an attempt to find a common thread. This is not as difficult as it sounds, even the most dissimilar set of slides often have similarities that you may have not noticed earlier; viewing them multiple times will bring them forth.




2. Make note of these similarities – if you get some ideas when you make the note, jot them as well.




3. If you are creating this makeover for someone, do ask them if they have some fixed visual styles – maybe color, branding elements, layout, fonts, etc. This might first seem like a limitation but combine the similarities explored earlier with these fixed concepts and you have a fair idea of where you are headed. In addition, this will avoid you having to do costly mistakes that need to be corrected later. The left part of the human mind is great at getting adjusted to concepts that cannot be changed – thus leaving the right side with so much more creative freedom.




4. Go ahead and make changes. First start with changes that will affect all or most slides.




5. Thereafter go with the changes that affect only one or few slides.




6. View the entire presentation. Make a note of any interruption in the flow of one slide to the other as far as the design, content, or navigation is concerned. Try and improve those aspects.




7. And then start all over again. Repeat the process until you feel good about the presentation.

Even beyond these guidelines, the best way to get more comfortable with creating better makeover strategies is by doing more makeovers. I wrote an entire book on PowerPoint makeovers with Echo Swinford - PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit. Get a copy of the book and try out all the makeovers. All sample files are included on the CD attached with the book. Once you have done a few makeovers, you’ll find a method in the madness!

And remember that every makeover is different.

This post by Bert Decker is the second in our newly launched Slide Tips series.
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Although this series is about design in PowerPoint support – don’t go to the PowerPoints first. Design is essential. But before design comes something else. Purpose.

Garr Reynolds is an expert on presentation design – his article last week, along with his blog Presentation Zen and book of the same name, prove it. In today’s post, I’ll leave design to the expert, and focus on creating what I call a Communications Experience for your audience, whether it’s one person or one thousand. To put it all in context, here’s how to prepare for a powerful presentation:

1. Create the message: one that is listener-based, focused and with action.
2. Develop the slides that best support the message – but don’t become the message.
3. Deliver it powerfully, remembering that YOU are the presentation.

1. Create the Message

Yes, you need a message first. Unfortunately, this is counterintuitive to many business people who create slides and support material first, then add the words. In 90% of the cases, business people go to their computers and hammer out the PowerPoints in text, words and bullets – with precious few visuals, unfortunately. Or worse, they begin pulling slides from old presentations, hoping it will all come together. Then they add notes and comments that they’ll say verbally – and deliver the presentation, with little relief from the flood of information. You cannot effectively create slides without a purpose. The message comes first.

Information vs. Influence
If your purpose is strictly to inform in a presentation, with many words, text and data, go no further. Write a book. Use those words and text. Create a training manual, white paper, or essay. (All of which can, and often, take the form of a 176 slide PowerPoint deck.) This is perfectly acceptable for information-laden (often technical, and highly detail oriented) presentations. But you will be creating basically a written document, one that can stand on its own, and does not necessarily need your delivery to make it a presentation.
Unfortunately, the great majority of business presentations (of which I’ve seen over 10,000 in the last 20 years) are basically written documents that inform, but don’t influence. They don’t inspire. They don’t generate action. And they certainly are not well designed.
Think of your next presentation as an opportunity to transform information to influence. Don’t give a status quo update to your leadership team on key metrics. Call them to elevate next quarter’s performance by allocating budget to your initiative. Why would you read information from an outline when you can answer a higher calling by making that information relevant to your listener, focused and action-oriented?
To prepare your message, begin with the end in mind. With what inspiration or action will people leave the room? Three elements are essential here – and are the Cornerstones of our Decker Grid™ methodology:

1. Point Of View: The “So what?” of your message. Think of this as the one think you want your listener to remember.
2. Action: What do you want your listener to do with the message?
3. Benefit: What’s in it for them? How will your listener benefit as a result of taking your action?

2. Develop the Slides

There’s nothing wrong with continuous slides in a presentation. There are fabulous presentations, in the form of what I refer to as a narrated slide show. Instead of text, the slides are rich with pictures, graphs, videos and other emotively moving images to view. One great example is Al Gore presenting his slide show of An Inconvenient Truth – very powerful visuals and impact. Or the many moving illustrated lectures similar to those presented at the annual TED conference. (To create these amazing visuals, be sure to reference the pros like Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte.)
There are two other categories that are narrated slide shows, and use the design elements mentioned above, but have no personal presentation.

• They are Webinars and conference calls in business, that have to have continuous slides and voice, and the Slidecasts in the Slideshare website, which have sound with a PowerPoint. Although the design principles are the same, text and words may have to augment.
• And then there is the pure slide show, such as we see in the Slideshare website. Here the design is everything, and all the elements above have to be even more dramatic.

3. Deliver the Message

For in-person presentations, adding one new design element to the basics above makes all the difference. It’s YOU! Your energy, enthusiasm and confidence go a long way to carrying the message. You and the message are one, and your PowerPoints are visual support to your message – it is NOT the message itself.
One of the best examples of creating the communication experience is Steve Jobs at MacWorld. He is not giving a narrated slide show, he is the show, and he is using brilliantly designed PowerPoint (Keynote in this case) support to emphasize, dramatize, and otherwise create memory hooks.
The reason so few presentations are communication experiences is that people have come to believe that the PowerPoints are the presentation. They miss the power in the gestalt of both person and visual making impact on a listener – and thus influencing an audience.

Use Black Slides (For in-person presentations ONLY)
The secret sauce in design of support for the Communication Experience is to use black slides in your PowerPoints. A black slide is literally a black, blank background slide. Not a logo, not a design, but a nothing – simply a black slide.
Using the Black Slide concept will do three things:

• Black slides will enable you to clear your screen when you have finished one point and are telling a story, amplifying, adding a postscript, etc.
• Black slides will enable you to cross in front of the projector when you want to move around, own your space, and not have to have the projector awkwardly showing some text on your body.
• But most of all, Black Slides will release you from PowerPoint prison, where you create your PowerPoints and they become your presentation. If you create your content first, and then decide what your support visuals are going to be, it’s a different ball game. And the payoff is enormous.

We coached a CEO of a major risk management company, who had used PowerPoints in the typical way. He embraced the Black Slide concept. He wanted to make his presentations a Communication Experience. So when he gave his next speech at his company kickoff meeting, when he hit the clicker and the screen went black, people were looking around, saying “what happened to the projector?” After a very few minutes they got used to it. They concentrated on the CEO, focused on his message, and bought into his vision. They also told him it was his best presentation ever.

Consider your purpose. Consider design. And then go beyond the basics.

We are starting a series of blog posts called Slide Tips - exclusive articles by the world’s leading presentation and communication experts. This post by Garr Reynolds is the first in that series.
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There are no panaceas leading to effective presentation visuals, and there are no quick fixes. But when it comes to creating more effective slides that complement the spoken words of a presenter, there is one graphic design principle that can make a huge difference if applied properly: the principle of empty space.

Emptiness or empty space (also called negative space or white space) is a key component of effective graphic design in general. Yet, as Alex White points out in The Elements of Graphic Design (Allworth Press), “the single most overlooked element in visual design is emptiness.” And this lack of attention to emptiness is one of the key causes of slides that are either ugly, ineffective, or both. Most people think of empty space—if they think of it at all—only as background, the canvas behind the text and graphic elements on a slide, the trapped space in between “the content.” Emptiness on a slide is not really something to concern ourselves with most people think. But empty space is not nothing, it is a powerful something. Empty space in your visuals can breath air into your key visual elements leading to greater clarity, understanding, and augmentation of your spoken word. When you start to view empty space as a positive element you are better able to avoid clutter by eliminating the non-essential.

Learning from the world around you

You can learn a lot about the idea of using fewer elements in a visual and using empty space to amplify your graphic by observing the visual design in the world around you. It’s everywhere. You can begin to improve your design mindfulness by reading books on graphic design as well as by the careful examination of the professional graphics around you right where you live. Graphic design is ubiquitous, especially in urban settings such as New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Tokyo, etc. but you can also find examples all around you in smaller towns too. As you commute to work or during your evening walk, begin to pay attention to the designs you observe—store fronts, advertising, posters, signs of all types, print media, and on and on. Designs that make good use of empty space will have messages—with or without text—that are easy to understand. Your eye does not wander or get confused. We notice differences. Designs that make use of emptiness often have good contrast and a clear design priority. We are not usually aware of “the design” of it, but we get the message. And the message is what it’s all about.

The land of Zen simplicity and visual clutter

Some of the best graphic design treatments in the world are done right here in Japan. And some of the most chaotic and mad examples of graphic design and communication are also right here. If you have been to Japan you know exactly what I am talking about. In Japan we have a 2000 year-old culture steeped in aesthetic appreciation and tradition juxtaposed with modern, fast-paced city centers which give one the feeling of living inside a giant pinball machine. Yet the lessons are everywhere. Below is an example from inside two department stores in my home of Osaka, Japan. Product displays in a retail space may seem to have nothing to do with presentation design, however, the importance of emptiness and removal of the non-essential can reveal itself in unusual places.

Above: This was snapped while shopping in an electronics store. We were shopping for an energy-efficient stainless steel refrigerator that would fit harmoniously with our kitchen appliances. However, while the price was easy to find, it was often hard to locate even the most basic information such as the exact size or energy consumption, etc. And it was difficult to imagine how this would actually look in our kitchen with the sea of clutter pasted over the very product we wanted to see.

Above: Here is a dining table in a furniture store just down the street from the electronics store. They get it. We need to imagine how the piece will look (and feel) in our home. The specs and details are there in a small sign, easy to find without searching.

Above: Advertising posters on trains offer good lessons as well. This poster (about 70cm wide) is encouraging passengers to take a trip to Gold Coast, Australia. Some of the type is no bigger than 10 point; I had to stick my nose to the glass to even read all that detail. Yet most people who see the poster will never be close enough to read all that detail. Good poster design should (1) be noticed, (2) be understood, and (3) be remembered (and hopefully get the viewer to take action). Posters and presentation visuals are different, but slides too must be noticed (have an impact), be understood, and help audiences understand and remember your point (or story, etc.).

In defense of the designer, this poster is a classic example of design-by-committee; the actual designer probably became no more than a computer operator with the client saying “Add this!” “Don’t forget that!” “Where’s the &^*#@! koala bear?!” and so on. Sadly, this poster resembles some design-by-committee PowerPoint slides which I have seen all too often in Japan. Often the default is: When in doubt, add more. “Slide-by-committee” is responsible for a lot of really bad PowerPoint slides everywhere in the world.

Above left: A classic poster that is painfully similar to a lot of PowerPoint slides. The designers of the poster on the right showed restraint, leaving most of the space empty.

Above: A lot of billboards which feature rich full-bleed images and a bit of text remind me of some good presentation slides. The entire “canvas” is covered by the image but the use of space, lack of clutter, and a clear focal point makes the visual easy to notice and understand in an instant. This huge billboard is across the street from the Apple Store.

Above: Here in a SlideShare deck are several examples and before/after slides that use empty space. All the slides were used to complement the spoken word in live talks.

Slide Tips is a weekly series of articles by leading presentation and communication experts.
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