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!

We’re in the middle of a series of posts this week which discuss the way I go about redesigning a set of slides. This is useful, practical information for you to use the next time you’re working to make your slides look better. We started on Monday with a look at the original slide and how to pare down the amount of text on it, then yesterday we chose a color scheme to use for the project. Today I’d like to look at selecting fonts.

There are tons of fonts out there, as you can tell by spending even just a few minutes on a site like MyFonts.com. Your computer probably came loaded with dozens of fonts, but there are thousands more out there, some free, some not. As you look through the fonts you have available to you or browse the collections on sale at a website, you may easily be overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices. How do you choose? Do you just go with one that looks cool?

Like I mentioned in yesterday’s post, we want all aspects of our design to hang together, to complement each other, and to support the over all message of the presentation. So it’s important that we choose a font that is not only visually appealing (there’s a place and time for virtually any font) but that also gives us the look and feel we’re going for.

Get To Know Your Fonts

Typography is the study of how language looks, and as  you know it can look many different ways. If you create presentations or handouts regularly, it would be beneficial for you to learn a little about typography. You don’t have to become an expert, but a little light reading will help you get beyond the default fonts you may be used to working with. For a free guide to get you started, you might try the Type Classification eBook by Jacob Cass. If you’re willing to invest a little money, I recommend The Non-Designer’s Type Book by Robin Williams or Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton. Each of these will give you a better understanding of fonts, where they come from and how they work.

For most designs you can probably do just fine by choosing only two fonts: one for your headlines and section headers, and another for the text that makes up the body. For the headers you can choose pretty much any font you like, but make sure that it is legible. Generally speaking, serif fonts (serifs are those little feet some letters have) are better for body text,as they make large portions of text (like a quote or an excerpt from a book) more readable. Whichever two fonts you choose, make sure to try them out together. Make sure they’re not too similar. Make sure they look good next to each other. Look around online for font combinations that work well. You can also get ideas for font combinations that work well together from a site like FontsInUse.com, which pulls font combinations from websites, magazines, and other places and then tells you which fonts were used.

Choosing Our Font

For this project, we won’t be using much text at all, just a few words here and there, so we only need to select one font. I’d like it to match the theme, education about butterflies and gardens. This doesn’t mean the font has to be overly ornate or “flowery”. It could be fairly plain, something that conjures up pastoral images and feelings of simplicity. This makes me think of some kind of script font, a font that mimics the look of handwriting created with a quill or pen nib.

There are a many popular script fonts out there. The thing to be careful of when choosing a script font is not to sacrifice readability by choosing one that is overly ornate. Some script fonts can look very calligraphic with lots of flourishes, swashes, and ligatures. Those could look too fancy for our purposes here, but aside from that, their overly stylized letterforms can be hard to read, especially from the back of the audience during a presentation.

After looking around at several different kinds, I think the one I like the best for our purposes here is “Savoye LET“, which I found available for free, here. Savoye LET is simple and quite lovely without being too much so. It will be attractive and readable without drawing too much attention to itself. Here’s an example of Savoye LET on a slide along with some of the colors from the color scheme, “Spring Garden”, that we choose yesterday.

So that’s how I select fonts. It’s somewhat subjective, but presentation design isn’t an exact science. This certainly isn’t the only font that will work in this situation. You might choose a different font that will work equally well. Whatever you choose, just keep in mind readability and the overall feel you’re trying to achieve.

Tomorrow I’ll show you how I go about choosing imagery to support each slide’s main idea.

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.