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How many times have you heard someone say that they hate PowerPoint? This sentiment is usually the direct result of having just been forced to sit through a meeting in which all of the cardinal sins of presentation design were committed. In these instances, the adage “love the sinner, hate the sin” gets adapted to “love the user, hate the tool.” Which is unfortunate because the tool, in these cases, is not completely to blame.

It’s easy to blame the tool because it does a lot of the work for you. It’s templates, after all, encourage you to use large quantities of bullet points with small, poorly-made graphics. So it’s PowerPoint’s fault that no one wants to listen to your presentation because it told you how to build your slides. Right?

I submit that while PowerPoint’s templates may be lacking, it is the user’s general lack of knowledge of visual communications technique that causes most of the problems in slide design.

Let me explain what I mean.

Other tools, Microsoft Word for example, also contains templates (some good, some bad). Most users do not have nearly as hard a time choosing good templates and formatting their documents properly with Word as they do in PowerPoint. What’s behind this? I believe the reason that the average user is more successful with Word is not because Word is a better-made tool, but because the average user has spent year after year in English classes learning to communicate in this medium. Compare that to the amount of time spent in graphic design class, and you start to see why most are forced to rely on PowerPoint’s templates more heavily. If it weren’t for the fact that school’s require us to become very good at communicating verbally we might very well be complaining about “Death by Word.”

The good news is that visual rhetoric can be learned, just as verbal rhetoric can, by anyone willing to study. It’s funny, but perhaps not surprising, that we assume learning to communicate in visual language requires some “natural artistic ability” whereas anyone can learn to read and write. The truth is that all it takes is some time spent learning the basics of this new language and anyone can begin to think like a graphic designer. Of course, mastery of the medium takes years of study and practice, but it’s shocking how much of a difference in your slides will occur after learning just some of the basic rules of contrast, balance, alignment, etc.

P.S. – If you’re interested in learning a bit about visual communication I’d recommend The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams. I sure some of you reading this can recommend others and if so will do so in the comments.