Seth Godin’s ebook “Fix Your Really Bad PowerPoint”, is thirteen years old, but the concepts still seem groundbreaking today. HighSpark took those concepts and applied them to the fantastic presentation I’ve shared here. I never see PowerPoints like this at my company. In his blog post, Godin mentions being forced to use a template. Well, it’s the same thing where I work. Lots of bullets, lots of “swim lanes”. Lots of boring.
I absolutely love this presentation, simply because it is so incredibly different than what I’ve seen before. That said, there are several thoughts that hit me as I flipped through the slides. First of all, would something like this be appropriate for my audience? Secondly, I’m no graphic artist; how the heck am I going to put together slides that look this cool?
I think the answer to the first question is “Probably not.”. That’s not to say that a lot of the ideas here won’t work. I just think an overly flashy style might detract a bit from my message. I certainly plan on using graphics, but perhaps in a bit more of a conservative manner. Admittedly, that’s partly due to my lack of graphic design skills more than an aesthetic choice!
You’d be surprised at what you can accomplish even with limited graphic design experience. That’s the point of the tools, after all–to boost your work’s appearance. The biggest hurdle is one you’ve already named–getting out of the template zone.
I know that’s rich coming from me when I’ve assigned you TSIS all summer, but as we discussed there, too, the point of templates is to help you get going when you feel like you’re spinning your wheels. There’s a lot of room for creativity that builds on those.
The problem is with PowerPoint’s layout templates that shove everything into 1 or 2 columns of text/graphics, and use bullet points as the default. Once you let go of that vision, you can do a million different, much cooler things with the same technology.
This article has some useful graphic design advice for ppt: https://getmygraphics.com/blog/5-powerpoint-design-tips-graphic-designer/
Thank you!