Well, loyal readers, you’ve made it through the week. This is the fifth and final post in this series on how I redesign slides. Here’s a reminder of what we started with.

Over the course of the week we’ve covered how to break slides up so there’s one idea on each slide, and how to choose a color scheme, a font, and images. Today we’ll be combining everything we’ve done so far into a finished product.

Resize images

Step one is to resize our images. This may be as simple as changing the height and width to 800 pixels and 600 pixels respectively. But not all images are the proper proportions to do this and some may require cropping to make them work. It’s easy to do both using MS Paint, or a more powerful graphics editor if you have access to one.

Place Images as our Slide Backgrounds

I’m using the same slides we ended up with on Monday, the plain white slides with a few words of black text. I’m adding the images from yesterday (Thursday) in the order in which I attached them to the bottom of the post. My slides now look something like this.

Making the images slide backgrounds is better than simply adding them as pictures because it keeps the images behind the other elements on the slide.

Make sure that you remember the image attribution, otherwise you’ll be using these images illegally. I usually place the attribution in one of the corners of my images by adding a simple, subtle text box with the words “Image Credit:” followed by the image creator’s name.

Positioning the Text

The next step is to move the text to where we want it. Many people don’t move text boxes around, they just leave them wherever PowerPoint places them. This is usually not a good way to go. You can place elements anywhere on the slide, so it would be best to place it exactly where you want it to go. If you imagine a grid of four lines, two vertical, two horizontal, that divide the slide evenly into nine equal parts, it’s best to position items of interest where the lines cross. These points are called “power points” believe it or not and placing elements here is a technique used by graphic designers, photographers, etc.

Where the lines cross are called power points.

The first step is to apply the font we chose on Tuesday (part 2) and get the font size set. This will help us figure out how much room the text will take up. We could position the text before we typeset it, but we’d probably just end up tweaking things and moving them around later. Remember that the font we chose was called “Savoye LET”. I’ve chosen a font size of about 72pt.

You also need to eliminate the bullets. You should really only use bullets if there are at least two of them. You can turn bullets off by highlighting the text and then clicking the button with bullet points on it, shown below.

Ensure Contrast

The final step is to make sure your text will be visible when sitting on top of your image. If there isn’t sufficient contrast between the text and the background, I usually choose to place a shape behind the text to make the text stand out. I chose to set the type in the Yellow Green color from Tuesday (RGB – 159, 219, 67). This is a fairly light green when compared with the background images we’ve chosen, so I placed a simple rectangle behind the images. I formatted that rectangle by removing the line (set the line to “no line” in the “Format Shape…” dialog box) and giving it a gradient fill. I chose to give it a radial, centered background with two stops. The first color stop is the lighter brown from “Spring Garden” which is RGB – 56, 30, 16. The second stop I set to the same color then just used my color picker to darken it a bit.

Here are the finished slides.

Here’s the finished PowerPoint file for you to download so you can take these slides apart and see how they work if you like. (You need to have the font Savoye LET installed on your system or the slides won’t appear as they do here. You can download the font for free, here.)

So that’s how I work. Thank  you so much for following along this week. I hope it’s been enjoyable as well as beneficial for you. If you have any questions about any part of this process that I haven’t answered sufficiently, please leave a comment below. Otherwise, best of luck creating your next set of slides!

This is part four of a five part series on how I design slides. So far we’ve covered one-idea-per-slide, selecting colors, and selecting a font. Today I’d like to show you how I go about choosing images. Tomorrow we’ll put it all together into a finished product so stay tuned.

There are really three things to think about when choosing images.

1. Show & Tell

Obviously the main reason for using images instead of text is to illustrate what the presenter is saying. If your subject is somewhat abstract or complicated, you may need to be creative in choosing appropriate images. You don’t have to choose the most obvious choice to illustrate an idea. In fact, sometimes it’s good to choose an idea that’s somewhat once removed from the most obvious choice because it engages the audience’s brains and makes them think about why you chose to use a particular image. For example, if you want to illustrate the idea of partnership, you might be tempted to use a picture of two hands shaking in front of a globe. That’s an obvious choice. The low-hanging fruit, if you will. But there are all kinds of other ways to illustrate the same idea. Salt and Pepper, Batman and Robin, Hammer and Nail…you just have to think a little longer to get there. (Note: all of these examples came from page 27 of Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte) By choosing the road (or image) less traveled, you’re certainly on your way to being more memorable.

In our slides, though, we can be pretty straight forward. Let’s look at the text from the slides once again.

Once butterflies are visiting, you can entice them to take up residence by:

Choosing flowers that bloom at different times. Butterflies will stay in your garden if there’s a constant source of nectar.

Providing host plants. Butterflies lay their eggs on host plants and most are very particular. Milkweed, Nettles, and native grasses are the most popular. The prized Eastern Tiger Swallowtail prefers a tree, either a Sycamore or a Willow. The bolder Spicebush Swallowtail prefers Ash, Sassafras, and Tulip trees. If you live on the edge of a field or meadow, you probably don’t need to worry about host plants—there are plenty of them nearby.

Providing shelter from the wind and rain in the form of tall shrubs, vines, and even small trees.

There are all kinds of things we can show here. Butterfly habitats, flowers, various types of plants and trees, several specific species of butterfly, and even some weather formations. All of these should be fairly easy to find images for.

2. Color Scheme

The second thing to keep in mind is the color scheme we chose back on Tuesday. You may remember that we chose one from Adobe Kuler called “Spring Garden”. Here it is again to refresh your memory.

We need to choose images that go along with this color scheme, so the images we select should contain some or all of these colors. It shouldn’t be too difficult, since we chose our color scheme with butterflies and gardens in mind, but this will keep us from choosing black and white imagery, for example. All of the images should look like they belong together.

3. Whitespace

The third thing to keep in mind is the need for some whitespace. Some images are consumed 100% by their subjects, while some leave room to breathe. It’s this last kind we’re most interested in. This will leave us a place to position the text we want to have on our slides. In my opinion, images with whitespace are often more interesting as well, as the open areas give us a sense of openness and peacefulness that you don’t get with crowded and busy images. For more on whitespace, read the chapter on it (chapter 6) in Garr Reynolds second book, Presentation Zen Design.

4. Resolution

We need to make sure we use images that are of a high enough resolution that they won’t appear blurry or pixelated when we use them to fill the background of our slides. Most of the time at least 800 x 600 pixels is about as low as you want to go. Bigger is better in this case, but if you choose an image that’s a lot bigger than that, you’ll be using a large image which will make your file size skyrocket. If you do find a larger image, it’s probably best that you resize it using a tool like Photoshop, GIMP, or even just MS Paint. Also, you may need to crop certain images to make them the size you need. This is fine, as long as you have the right to do so. Check once again with the owners wishes for the use of his/her work.

Seek and You Will Find

With these four principles in mind, we can now begin searching for images. For this, I recommend you use one of two websites: iStockPhoto or Flickr.

The stock photography on iStockPhoto is top-notch and very affordable. There are even tools in the search features that allow you to search for images containing specific colors or with whitespace in a particular place. The only drawback is that the images do cost money, which can make things difficult if you’re on a tight-to-non-existent budget.

The imagery on Flickr has been uploaded by all number of individuals, from casual shutterbugs to professional photographers. But there’s a ton to choose from and much of it is very good. What’s even better is that many of the people have made their imagery available under a Creative Commons license that may allow you to use their images for free, in exchange for your giving them credit whenever you use them. Make sure you pay attention to these rules and respect the wishes of the photo creator.

A tool that I recommend highly to help you find imagery on Flickr is called Compfight, and you can read more about it and how it works in one of my previous posts.

Using Compfight I was able to find these images which I think meet all three of the above criteria and will work nicely for our presentation.

Image by melolou

Image by brentdanley

Image by Ryan Somma

Image by tanakawho

Happy New Year, readers!

Last week, Jon Thomas, founder of the presentation design firm Presentation Advisors, wrote a blog post in which he mentioned a slide re-design contest that was going on over at TechRepublic. The contest was to redesign this slide:

In his post, Jon discusses the fact that this contest is not for true presentation designers and that the rules (click the TechRepublic link above to read them) don’t allow us to really redesign the slide the way we’d like.

I get slides like this all the time to redesign, and I thought it might be fun (as well as educational) for me to show you exactly how I would go about reformatting this slide.

Over the next few days I’ll walk you through my process, step-by-step, explaining each of my design choices along the way. I’ll show you how I separate ideas onto individual slides, reduce text, choose fonts and colors, find stock imagery that supports the main points and more. Hopefully this will give you a sense of how I work, and may give you some ideas for how you can go about improving some of your slides in the future.

So, let’s get started.

One Idea Per Slide

The first thing I notice about this slide is the large quantity of text. People can only process one stream of verbal input at a time, so if the speaker is speaking while this slide is being displayed, the audience will either listen to the speaker and ignore the slide or read the slide and ignore the speaker. They can’t do both. Also, it appears the speaker has put everything he or she is going to say on the slide. Since audiences can read faster than any speaker can speak, this technique essentially makes the presenter unnecessary. Furthermore, having more than one bullet-point on the screen is distracting, which you can read more about in Jon’s post. For all of these reasons we need to do two things to this slide: 1) separate the ideas out onto their own slides, and 2) reduce the amount of text on each slide.

The first thing I did was to recreate the slide in PowerPoint so I could start from scratch. I just tinkered around with fonts and colors until I found ones that were similar. I didn’t have a butterfly graphic to use for the bullets, so I just found something similar. (Click on any of these images to see them full-size.)

I’ll show how to choose better fonts and colors in a later post this week, so for now I just removed all the formatting. My slide now looks like this:

There are three bullets, plus a title, for a total of four distinct ideas here. So the next step is to make three duplicates of this slide.

Next I remove text, leaving exactly one bullet point per slide.

I now have one idea on each slide, but there’s still too much text. Since all of what the presenter is going to say is currently on the slide, I copy and paste that text into the presenter’s notes section of each slide.

Eliminate unnecessary words.

With the original content preserved in the notes, I now remove as much text as possible from the slide while still conveying the basic idea.

So that’s a good start. Move each idea onto its own slide and reduce text as much as possible. Tomorrow I’ll show you how to choose a color scheme and an appropriate font.

To make sure you don’t miss the rest of this series you can subscribe to Advance Your Slides via RSS or email or just make sure to stop by here again tomorrow.