Layout

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.

Logo cropping

This screen shot is typical for many logo pages in presentations:

Writing text on charts

Most charts consists of 2–4 “boxes” with some text inside them. Text in boxes is different from text in sentences and/or paragraphs. When writing an article, you don’t have to worry about how long a line is, and/or whether it fits exactly in a certain amount of space.

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…

Backgrounds and introductions

You got 30 minutes with a senior executive to present your case in a highly politically charged issue. Many people bring a very long deck that starts slowly, industry trends, backgrounds, history, until finally at 25 minutes we get to the real issue.

Editing Instagram photos

A quick post written on my iPad while enjoying my vacation here in beautiful Vietnam. I make a lot of Instagram snaps and here is the way I edit photos in the application.

I do not use the pre-installed filters, they are random permutations of image…

Column titles

I add them when they mean something. It is important to know whether the data is about 2015 or 2016 for example. On the other hand “description”, “item”, “option”, “date”, “comment”, “scenario” etc. are not always necessary. See if you can do without them

Tone down the ambition

Below is a professional print ad for Audi, trying to convince us that its heritage of cars is still present in today’s models.

Start with counting

The most fundamental feature of my presentation design app SlideMagic is the strict use of a grid to layout your slide. And there is a good reason for that.

Every slide I design start with counting. How many points. How many options. How many pro’s and con’s for each…

More complicated slides

For some reason, I find myself designing more complicated, busy slides recently. Busy does not mean more text and bullet points. Busy means showing complex arguments in diagrams: boxes that overlap, are interwoven, move from one into the next.