First of all, you need to learn how to design slides. Because you make slides for others, not for yourself. Think about it: how many times did you make slides for yourself? Rarely never.
So when do you use slides? You use them to show what you have done. It can be research, data analysis, or design exercise for your job interview. The key is that you are not the audience. You are informing others. Even with excellent data and research, without good visualization and professionalism, your slide may not be comprehensive to your audience.
The slides are like a storyboard. You have to start with an introduction, briefly talk about what you are going to say. Show data and research to back up your opinion and wrap up with some outcome or a result. To make it more effective in storytelling, make them pretty.
From the book I’m listening on Audible, The Design of Everyday Thinking by Nielson Norman said,
Visceral response is fast and completely subconscious…for designers, the visceral response is about an immediate perception. The pleasantness of mellow, harmonious sound, or the jarring iterating scratch of fingernails on a rough surface. Here is where the style matters. Appearances, with their sound or sight touch or smell, drive their visceral response. This is nothing to do with how usable or effective or understandable the product is. It is all about attraction or repulsion. Great designers use their esthetics sensibilities to drive these visceral responses.
Obviously what he is saying is that people like beautiful things. But what’s beautiful? Keep it simple, organize and concise. If you can keep these rules, it will be usable, effective and understandable to your audience.
So, how to design slides?
Step 1
Layout your content on Google docs or OneNote or Evernote. Just list out or write out all the content. It’s better if you are more specific. This will help you guide how you will present your work.
Step 2
Start bringing your content to slides. Don’t worry about the layouts for now.
Step 3
Go over the slides and see if it make sense. Think as you’ve never seen the slide before. Then find what’s missing and what should you add. The key is to find what’s missing.
Step 4
Start from the beginning of slides, find things that are not necessary or redundant. If there is too much data, your audience may exhaust on your slides. Break your information into multiple slides.
Step 5
Repeat steps 3 and 4 for a few more times.
Laying out the content is a lot easier to fix before you dive deeper into designing the layouts.
Step 6
Start designing in monochromatic. Use black and white. All you need to design is four templates:
1. Cover (Title, name, dates, etc.)
2. Divider (Title of the section)
3. Content (Title, eyebrow (the title of the section), contents, photos/data chart)
3. Quote / Attention grabber (A sentence that is no longer than three lines)
For individual slides, you may consider..
Typography and content
- Hierarchy is the key. Think of what’s the most important to least important. Is it the content or the title?
- Please don’t write a paragraph. Break them into bullet points, or even different slides.
- Be legible, don’t use a hand-written style font.
- If it’s important, make it big and bold.
- Use text weight to differentiate the importance. It’s not just regular and bold. If you click the actual typeface in the dropdown, you can find different font-weight that you can choose from.
Color
Use colors to highlight. Don’t use colors everywhere. Always think about what is most important.
Image
- Don’t use blurry photos. It doesn’t look professional.
- Don’t use the photo with a watermark. There are great resources that you can find like Unsplash.
- Don’t rotate photos. like this.
Chart / Tables
If you have ten thousand things to say about your data, just break them down into different tables or charts. Keep in mind that if you don’t want to read it, they don’t want to read it. If you really have to put all the data in your table, then highlight just a few things that are most important.
Main key points
- Think of who is your audience.
- Don’t write a paragraph.
- Be legible.
- Don’t be afraid of using white space. White space is a part of the design.
- Most importantly, be consistent.
Tips and Conclusion
For me, when I have to design for a certain brand, I use their brand color from the logo. I don’t need a brand guideline to make them professional. I can just grab their logo from the site and analyze how it looks and feel.
If you know how to inspect their site using Chrome, I look for the font that they used. If they used Google Font, awsome! I’ll use the exact same font. But even if they didn’t, I use the san-serif font.
To be consistent, I use an alignment tool very often. I can align left, right, top-bottom or middle. I use text weight, color, and size to differentiate the hierarchy. If the text is in all the same style, it’s very hard to read.
I’ve learned this technique at work. While I analyze brand guidelines and slides that I had to make for the media and the marketing team. It was a great practice to know how to design slides with simple techniques.
Thanks for reading!
