Beautiful and inspiring presentation by Maria Giudice of Hot Studio.

Also, get an eyeful of all of Hot Studio’s great presentations here.

Handsome set of slides.

via Note and Point

Just wanted to share a set of slides I created recently for the great folks at MightyMeeting. They have a great app for sharing presentations and hosting online meetings and I am excited to have had the opportunity to work with them.

Paul Rand, the legendary graphic designer, once said, “Without contrast, you’re dead.” Today I’m gonna share with you a very, very simple technique for making sure that your slides have enough contrast and your audience will be able to read the text.

The trouble with full-bleed images

Garr Reynolds and many other presentation experts recommend using full-bleed images (i.e. – images that completely fill your slides) and I concur. If you do use full-bleed images and want to include text as well, it’s necessary to overlay your text on top of the background image. It’s crucial in these situations to find a font color with high enough contrast to the background image that the text will be legible. Sometimes it’s possible to find an image with plenty of whitespace or areas where text will sit nicely. With other images, though, you may struggle to find a font color that will stand out over a complicated background.

To provide the contrast needed for my text to be visible in these situations, I usually place a semi-transparent shape behind the text box. This is a very simple thing to do and it may seem obvious, but if you’ve never thought of it before it can be eye-opening. It makes a huge difference.

An Example

Suppose that you want to use the image below as your full-bleed background.

[Image Credit: Bob Gutowski]

You might be able to place some small text in either of the upper two corners, but if you’re placing a quote or some longer portion of text on the image, it might be tricky.

Choosing a good font color

You probably want to choose a font color that goes well with the image, like a dark brown or dark blue. If your have software with a color-picker, it’s good to select a color that already appears in the image. You can also use a tool like Adobe Kuler‘s Create > From an Image option to find colors that go together well with your image.

Even if you use black or white, the two colors with the highest amount of contrast, the text still won’t really be readable on this background (see below).

But look what happens when you place some color behind the text box.

In each of these examples the text shows up very well and is very readable.

Another option

There’s often more than one way to skin a cat and this is no exception. Another way to achieve a similar effect is to set the ‘fill’ attributes for your text box. This essentially adds a background color to your text box and will wind up looking very similar to the effect above. The major difference is that you cannot control the precise size of the text box. For example, if you have two text boxes that you want to place a single shape behind, there’s no way to do this using fills and you’ll have to use the background shape method I just discussed. But if your layout only calls for a single text box, this is a perfectly acceptable alternative.

Transparency is your friend

I’d also encourage you to use transparency. You can place a solid shape behind your text, but I think transparency looks better because it doesn’t completely obscure the background image. There’s really no magic bullet for how much transparency to use, so just toy around with it until you find something that you like that still provides sufficient contrast between the shape and the text.

This little tip may seem very, very simple and that’s because it is. But I’m always surprised by how many presenters don’t use it. Remember Mr. Rand’s admonition about contrast and make sure your audience gets the message.

Below are the three most important rules to remember next time you build a presentation.

One Idea Per Slide

Bullet points are great for creating lists: like product features or ice cream flavors. But if your speech has three major points, please don’t put them all on one slide. Slides are free so don’t be afraid to use as many as you need. Displaying one idea per slide keeps your audience focused on one thing at a time. They can’t read ahead and they won’t be tempted to re-read your last point. Not that that would ever happen…

The Three Second Rule

Nancy Duarte calls slides a glance media, like billboards: people have to be able to fully understand their message as they fly by at seventy miles an hour. The goal of any visual aid is for the audience can glance at the slide, process the information quickly, then bring their focus right back to you, the presenter. If your slide can’t be fully understood in three seconds or less, make it simpler.

Simplify

Everything on a slide ought to be there for a reason. It’s easy to get carried away adding embellishments here and there, filling our slides with what Edward Tufte calls “chartjunk.” Chartjunk can include everything from ridiculously ornate borders to unneeded gridlines on a bar graph. Anything that is not absolutely necessary to convey your slide’s single message should be removed. (Careful, though. In your haste to remove everything extraneous it can be easy to go to far and remove something important. Make sure you steer clear of this trap.)