Usable Presentation Design

Giving Usable
Presentations

Wednesday, April 18, 12

Tufte


Here’s what he says:


PowerPoint is Evil.


PowerPoint is Evil.
Makes us stupid.


PowerPoint is Evil.
Makes us stupid.
Makes us boring.


PowerPoint is Evil.
Makes us stupid.
Makes us boring.
Wastes time.


PowerPoint is Evil.
Makes us stupid.
Makes us boring.
Wastes time.
Degrades quality of communication.


Here’s the reality:


1. Powerpoint is here
to stay.


2. All visual elements are
what you make them.


3. Everything depends on
your communication skills.


Audience boredom is
usually a content failure, not
a decoration failure.


Function


Function
Over


Function
Over
Form


Always.

(But form still counts.)


Signal vs Noise


You’ve probably been doing
traditional PowerPoints all
these years.


Here’s what I want you to
aim for in your ﬁnal
presentation to this class:


Simple.

Few bullets.


Minimal text.


No logos.


No unnecessary elements.


Strong images.


Striking.

Humans think visually.


Look at this stock graph:


“Visual” has many elements:


Typefaces


Design


Images


All of these build


Ethos


Ethos Ethos Ethos!


So, having said that:


Let’s think about
document design.


First concern: legibility


• This is 12 point type.


• This is 18 point type.


• This is 28 point type. This is about as small as you
ever want to go for projected presentations.


• This is 32 point type -- a bullet size.


This is 64 point. It’s a
good size for headers
and statements.


All of that was in
sans-serif type.


Examples of sans-serif typefaces:

• This is Arial.
• This is Century Gothic.
• This is Helvetica.
• This is Verdana.
• (All of these are 32 point.)


(Serifs are those little tails
on the edges of letters.)


Examples of serif typefaces:

• This is Georgia.
• This is Goudy Old Style.
• This is Palatino.
• This is Times New Roman.
• All of these are also 32 point.


Be wary of novelty typefaces.

• This is braggadocio.
• This is Brush Script MT
• This is Colonna
• This is Curlz
• This is Herculanum


What if you wrote
everything in Curlz?
• It would be harder to read, for one thing.
• It also tampers with your ethos.
• This is not a very professional typeface.


Sometimes it can work
for you.


Intro to
Goth Culture
(That is Blackmoor)


New Football
Stadium
(That is Princeton)


Fonts

• This is a bold font.
• This is an italic font.
• This is a bold italic font.


DON’T WRITE IN
ALL CAPS.

IT SLOWS YOUR
READER DOWN
CONSIDERABLY.

Sometimes a bit of
color is rather pleasant.


Why use color?


Focuses attention.


Don’t make it look like
a rainbow blew up on
your slides.


Problems:


Room lighting can be a
huge issue.


So is the way colors
look when projected.


Also, be kind to your
audience’s eyes.


Yellow text on a garish
background?


Also, be sure to account
for cultural considerations.


Do your best to develop a
general sense of these
things beforehand.


So, what should be on a slide?


Ideally, not much.


Keep your text
simple and short.


Limit yourself.
• No more than 2 typefaces and 3 fonts in a
document.
• Use one size for headers, one for subheads,
and one for body text.


Why?
• Because huge blocks of texts on a screen
confuse the eye and overwhelm the mind.
Your audience will be much busier trying to
read it all than they will be paying attention
to you. You want to minimize the possible
distractions, because presentation situations
are generally distracting enough. People are
cold, people are hot, people are thinking
about what’s on TV tonight, and now you’ve
got them reading all this text. And it’s a lot,
isn’t it?

• What’s even worse is when presenters minimize the font size in order
to ﬁt more stuff on the screen. Then people have to squint, and they get
headaches, and they wonder what the heck is up with you and your
design skills. Why are you ambushing them with all this text? Do you
really need for them to read your presentation? No, not really. You
need to tell your story and use the PowerPoint slides to provide visual
emphasis of you major points.

• Folks who do this sort of thing usually also try to squeeze multiple
points onto one slide -- all in tiny type. And they go on and on and on
and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on with
the text because they’re trying to ﬁll up space, because they think that a
really full slide is a good and important slide. This is rarely the case.


Be clean.

• Highlight your major points.
• That’s all.
• You just want to drive them home
visually.


Use high contrast.


Use clean backgrounds.


Don’t do this:


This is a little better, but
still not entirely effective:


Be appropriate.


Your background and font
should match your topic.


Kill monotony!


Don’t be afraid to play.


Picture Superiority Effect


(n): Theory that states pictures are better
remembered than words.


Which slide is more
memorable?


Rolleiﬂex Camera


Powerful
Efﬁcient
Direct


When choosing images,
aim for


Big and clear


Interesting


This is a perfectly ﬁne photo of a cow.


But this one is way
more memorable:


Strive for clarity.


Grab the largest images
possible to avoid pixelation.


At least 800 pixels will
give you the clearest
cow possible.


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