Typography

Text balance

Shapes, their sizes, and the layout grid set the balance of a slide. But text as well and is often overlooked. Watch out for these:

• One word that drops to the second line
• A very long word that makes a sentence break halfway the page

The largest amount of text

The eye wants boxes on a slide to be equal in size. That is why I am always battling with the box with the largest amount of text, it determines the shape size and/or font size of all the boxes on the chart. Here you need to be a newspaper front page layout designer/editor and cut…

Lining up text, lining up text boxes

A post for the purists today. In PowerPoint, a text box and a rectangular coloured shape with text line up the same way: you hover them across the slides and “snap” lines appear that encourage you to line things up with items above or below. To do it correctly…

Calibri light

It has been years since I have worked on Windows machines, and given that they do not have Helvetica installed, I would still prefer design most of my presentations in Arial over Calibri, the current default Microsoft Office font on my Mac.

Lining up logos with tag lines

Often, graphics design is about details. It is difficult to pin down why something just does not look right. The answer: small little things. See the bottom of a magazine ad below. The logos on the left and right have tag lines/sub brands: above on the left, and below on the…

Line breaks deserve your attention

When you write a block of text, the editor will insert line breaks without you noticing. Fonts are relatively small and the resulting text blocks look always good.

Designing presentation slides is different though. The position of every word…

Design DNA

Design DNA is engrained in a company. It shows in presentations, in the web site, in the way the office is laid out. When a visitor/user/viewer gets in touch with a company, she makes up her mind in the first millisecond about the design DNA of the company, by comparing it to all other presentations, web…

Learning from Swiss graphic designers

Most presentation design software today is the result of someone in the 1980s thinking: “hey, this mouse is cool, you can use it to draw things!”. We can move, drag, stretch, place things freely across our drawing canvas.