Would Fred Astaire’s scintillating dance moves have looked as good if he had abandoned his usual suave wardrobe in favor of clothes that made him look like one of the irredeemable low-life characters represented in A Hillbilly Elegy?

We’ll never know, but there is one thing we do know: The best substantive presentation material looks even better if packaged well. Formatting slide shows is an art. Compliance with some basic slide show formatting principles won’t make you Monet, but will put you on the road to being a passable PowerPoint artist.

Glad to see my article Slide Show Formatting Basics is available at LLRX.

Would Fred Astaire’s scintillating dance moves have looked as good if he had abandoned his usual suave wardrobe in favor of clothes that made him look like one of the irredeemable low-life characters represented in A Hillbilly Elegy? 

We’ll never know, but there is one thing we do know: The best substantive presentation material looks even better if packaged well. Formatting slide shows is an art. Compliance with some basic slide show formatting principles won’t make you Monet, but will put you on the road to being a passable PowerPoint artist:

Bullet Points

Bullet points have the salutary effect of improving quick comprehension. However, deploy them wisely. Squeezing too many bullet points on a slide creates a cluttered impression. No more than five bullet points per page is a pretty good rule of thumb.

Avoid having more than two levels of bullets on slides. In other words, you can have a bullet point, and one sub-level below them. If you need more sub-levels to convey complex ideas, it’s better to break them into more slides.

Templates

Good slide show software provides templates (called “slide masters” in MS PowerPoint) to provide a consistent layout. I occasionally see presenters who do not use templates. It’s nearly always a mistake. The templates are designed by pros. The defaults in a decent template will facilitate a professional appearance. A Google search on the phrase using powerpoint templates will find plenty of tutorials to get you started. 

You can:

• Override the template for a particular slide or
• Modify the template (surprisingly easy)

You can even create your own templates. It’s not something I’d recommend to most lawyers. In any event, using templates is an easy way help make a good impression on your audiences.

Logos

Some presenters who have just learned how to edit templates or create their own succumb to the temptation to include their organization’s logo on every slide. This is popular in businesses as a form of branding, but there is a drawback. Including a logo on every slide limits flexibility. 

The best approach is probably to include the logo on the first slide, and maybe the last. If demands of unsophisticated supervisors or an overly doctrinaire marketing department make you feel you absolutely must include the logo on every slide, make it small, except on the first slide and the last, where you can usually get away with more. 

Whatever you do, don’t follow the example of one government conference presentation I saw that included no less than four different agency seals on every single slide, one for each of the four presenters!

Old fashioned transparencies, often referred to as overheads, worked much better as dark text on a light, preferably white background. Modern computer slide show projectors use a different technology. With slides, light colored text works best against a dark background.

What background color is best? Some authorities suggest trying to match colors to the emotional mood you are trying to create. For example:

Purple: Royalty, wisdom, spirituality, mystery

Green: Nature, environment, health, reptiles, insects

Gray: Conservative, practical, reliability, security, staid

See the Think Outside the Slide website for more.

Certainly there might be some benefit to this approach in some situations. However, as a practical matter I usually give these factors little consideration when preparing my own slide shows. I normally use the color combination that is generally acknowledged to have the highest legibility: Dark blue background, with light text, usually white or yellow. The most important thing for me is that the audience be able to read the slides easily. I’ll use methods other than color if I feel I need to maniuplate the audience’s emotions.

Whatever color scheme you choose, to improve legibility try to maximize the contrast between foreground and background. Light grey text on a medium gray background is a recipe for disaster. The Think Outside the Slide website has a color contrast calculator.

Glad to see my latest article on slide shows in the June issue of LLRX.com. An excerpt:

Antipathy toward slide shows is understandable but misdirected. Most are poor. Too many users of slide shows don’t understand what they are doing or don’t put in enough effort, or both. A high percentage of slide shows are painful for audiences. However, the story is not that simple.

A slide show is a tool, an instrument like a hammer, airbrush or violin. A poorly constructed house is the result of bad carpentry. A poor airbrush user makes the classiest model look like a tramp. A poor violinist will make a Stradivarius sound like a hungry cat.

Good carpenters build sturdy houses. Good airbrushing can make ordinary models look glamorous. The gifted Jacqueline Du Prey made Dvorak’s Cello concerto sublime. Good slide shows can help presenters better educate, persuade, and even inspire.