Brief memo by Churchill on brevity

Still relevant today:

Presentation design without the design

Most business presentations can be done perfectly without sophisticated and complex visual concepts. That image of an elephant balancing on a ball, or a 3 dimensional constellation of rotating database cylinders might not be necessary to get your point across.

Clouds in PowerPoint

The standard cloud shape in PowerPoint is not very pretty. Especially if you need a different aspect ratio, there is no option but to stretch the shape, making it look even worse. My solution is to combine multiple cloud shapes into one to get a decent new shape (SHAPE FORMAT, MERGE SHAPES…

PowerPoint Designer — first impressions

Microsoft has been adding a number of features to PowerPoint recently. One of them is Designer. In the Design tab of the ribbon, a new button appears on the right “Design Ideas”. Clicking it generates alternative layouts of your slides on the right side of…

How to brief a presentation template designer

The traditional approach is to hand the designer a blank slide and say “we need a fresh PowerPoint template”. You will get a slide back full of supporting graphics, logos, page numbers which shows that the designer added some value.

How to present pros and cons

A question came in on Twitter the other day:

Basic presentation template organization

Years of experience with client presentation templates have confirmed that there is basically only one way to lay out a corporate template.

• Title at the top left. Some templates have a huge corporate logo getting in the way there