After I posted the finished version of the slides from my Intergraph interview yesterday a few of you asked to see the “before” version to see how things changed. I thought that sounded like a good idea, so here they are.

And once again, here are the completed slides.

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.