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© 2004 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
THE CONCLUSION IS CLEAR and inescapable. It is no longer
sufficient that PowerPoint professionals seek to create good work.
They must also do battle with The PowerPoint Stigma. Annoying presentations
suffer a reputation almost as bad as spam in today’s computing
culture, and it should come as no surprise: bad presentations are
almost as prevalent as spam.
So please repeat after me: Today, I am going to make sure that I annoy no one with PowerPoint. We’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow, but that boomerang animation you were thinking about adding o all of your titles today? Let’s talk…
There is little doubt that this could be the first of a 500-part
series, and interest willing, we will add as many installments as
is necessary. Here are four candidates for just about anyone’s
list of deadly PowerPoint sins.
Just when I thought that experienced users were finally starting to get a clue about this, the following email arrives from a potential client whom I advised to remove the pinwheel entrances that he applied to many of his objects:
“That begs the question of why PowerPoint has so much technology invested in animation if there is little or no appropriate use for it in presentations that are supposed to be hip.”
I am reminded of the time that I quizzed my four-year-old daughter
in math, asking her to add 3+2 and she answered “apple.”
It’s like we are speaking a different language altogether,
and I wondered if the only response to my soon-to-be-former potential
client was to whack him upside the head and say, “Look, just
don’t do it, okay??”
Eliminating bad animation begins with defining it, and we will start
with two broad categories of animation:
Most bad animation belongs to the first category. If you ask your audience to track motion across the screen, you are implicitly saying that this action is worthy of merit, that there is some important reason why you are taxing their attention with its entrance. If the only payoff is a series of bullets or some other garden-variety object, then you have violated their trust. If you continue to violate trust, you will lose credibility and worse, your audience will wonder if you know the difference between what is important and what is inane. And if that happens, just leave the room, because all is lost.
No matter how ornate an animation is, if the object remains in its place, it will not be as distracting as those that move through space. A zoom-in or a dissolve is not as bad as a fly, a bounce, or a spiral. Better still, see if you can limit yourself to wipes and fades, two animations that are understated enough to qualify as elegant when used appropriately.
Misused slide transitions can even be worse, as entire screenfuls of objects are made to checkerboard, spiral, or commit some other crime against your eyesight. Why is it so important to notify everyone that you are changing slides? Instead, take the opposite challenge: see if you can change slides without anyone noticing.
The simple point is this: If you reserve ostentatious animation for content that truly merits it, you say something very important about your own sensibility, and that, in turn, helps your message. If you create a covenant with your audience that you will direct their attention in a responsible way, you create a connection and you contribute to rapport. You make them want to listen to you, and there is no price tag that can measure the value of that.
Stick to wipes and fades. Anything else…WHACK…just
don’t do it, okay??
We find that more often than not, this sin is perpetrated by women and upon men. Women are more likely than men to create slides with the kind of subtle contrast that would be award-winning in a kitchen design…and invisible to some men. Women tend to have a more refined sense of color schemes, and if you object to that generalization, let’s just skip straight to the statistics: colorblindness is 17 times more prevalent in men than in women.
The other factor that works against us is PowerPoint’s typical output device. Unlike print and ink, which can be counted on to produce consistent results, everyone’s monitor is different and rented projectors are often unpredictable. If a monitor’s red output is off or a projector’s contrast control has been tweaked, that slide that you were certain had crisp colors could wilt by the time it is shown.
Never in the history of PowerPoint usage has a big contract or sale been lost because someone used white text against a black or navy background. You simply cannot go wrong with this choice and if you read no further, we’ve done our jobs. However, there are appropriate occasions to go with less contrast and it would be a shame to have to compromise your design because of the seven percent of us who are unable to appreciate it or because of a faulty projector.
Here is a sample for you. We have dramatized these examples a bit (not unlike those car commercials that say “closed track, do not attempt at home…”), and we don’t suggest that anyone would want to adopt these kinds of colors for a bullet-heavy presentation. The text blocks on the first three slides are perfectly readable to some and practically invisible to others. While seeking subtlety in a color scheme is an admirable pursuit, you cannot risk creating illegible text.
Slides 4-6 remove the risk of illegibility while maintaining the
fidelity of the color scheme, all with a very simple drop shadow
behind the text. The drop shadow doesn’t even have to have
that much contrast; the main text and the shadow team up to create
the contrast. Note something very important about these drop shadows:
they are offset by the smallest of amounts. Please don’t go
creating those monster shadows, far away from the text, as if the
text is raised off the screen and there is a spotlight shining on
it. One click down and one click right is all it needs.
Let’s all say it together: If we hear one more whoosh accompanying the entrance of an object, we will low-level format the drive of the perpetrator. And if we catch you using that insipid camera click to change from one slide to another, when there is no camera or photograph in sight, we’re sending the MyDoom virus your way.
We have two problems here, because usually when one decides to add a whoosh to an object, one also decides that it is best to make that object fly in, checkerboard out, crawl up, or spiral downward. Two sins for the price of one.
This one should be easy: Does the object in question really make a sound? Are you showing an airplane coming in for a landing? If so, then go on to the next question; if not, then WHACK…just don’t do it, okay?? Next question: Can you create a realistic replica of the sound? Third: Can you integrate the audio clip in a smooth way, so it doesn’t seem as if you scotch taped a bullhorn to the projector?
Many users are drawn to the typewriter sound that comes with PowerPoint, but usually the effort ends up sounding like this. People do not type as if they are using a machine gun, rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat-tat. If you are trying to represent a paragraph being typed onto the screen, ask yourself how it would sound if you were typing it. Short of getting a microphone and recording your own typing (which is a good idea, by the way), you will need to recreate the rhythm, pattern, and the pace of real typing.
Adding sound to a presentation is about much more than just going to Insert | Movies and Sounds. That’s the easy part—the challenging part is making the audio clip sound as if it belongs. Too often, inserted sounds start harshly and end abruptly, calling far too much attention to themselves. If you intend to use audio clips in professional presentations, you will need to do what PowerPoint itself does not know how to do: refine the sound. You might need to fade the sound in and/or fade it out, add an echo to the end, and adjust its volume.
There are dozens of free and try-and-buy wave file editors available
to you, and it almost doesn’t matter which one you choose;
just that you do choose one. Relying on PowerPoint to make an audio
clip sound good is delusional, and relying on the few measly ones
that come with Office…WHACK!
Before I give anyone the wrong impression, let me say that I am a huge proponent of integrating photography in presentations. The digital photography revolution has been the best thing to come to PowerPoint in the program’s history. Photos are better than clipart in almost every situation.
But let’s please remember what a photograph is: it is a literal depiction of something. When you use it, it means that you are literally depicting something. Therefore, you must make sure that the thing you are literally depicting is related to the thing you are talking about.
I give you Defense Exhibit 1 This ocean horizon photo is quite attractive, even when seeing it for the zillionth time. The problem is that it has absolutely nothing to do with technology. At best, it is bereft of context, and at worst, disingenuous. It sends an instant disconnect to the audience—here is some bling for you, please be impressed…maybe you’ll even think I took the photo myself in my private helicopter.
It wouldn’t take much to save this situation, as the second slide in Defense Exhibit 1 shows. When you use a photo at full saturation (normal brightness and full intensity), any text you place atop it becomes linked to it—they become one. In this case, the text and the photo need some separation, which we achieved by sinking the photo into the background. To do this, we placed a blue rectangle over the photo and gave it a touch of transparency. And just putting the word “horizon” into the subtitle at least tells the audience that you tried to connect the photo to your message.
•
You can erase a career full of PowerPoint sins by considering the following: there is more than one way to show off. You can show off in PowerPoint by loading up on gratuitous effects, or you can show off by not. With the latter approach, you show off your sense of restraint—you proclaim that you know what is important in a presentation and what is not. That is an invaluable commodity for modern-day PowerPoint users. And one less person that we’d have to whack upside the head.
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