National Research Tomsk State University

Presentation skills: Designing Presentation Slides

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Course 2 of 4 in the Specialization Presentation Skills: Speechwriting, Slides and Delivery

“Powerpoint slides are like children: no matter how ugly they are, you’ll think they’re beautiful if they’re yours” — Scott Adams, author of the comic strip “Dilbert”. Due to this cause or another, it’s a huge stress to look at most Powerpoint slides. Depending on the “design” skills of the speaker and audience’s taste slides create different emotions from a slight annoyance to a physical sickness. But that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is that instead of improving the presentation such slides confuse the audience, distract them and finally oblige the speaker to explain them rather than being quite self-explanatory. The goal of this course is to change that by equipping learners with a set of tools to create simple, clear and aesthetic slides which improve the presentation of the speaker. The course covers universal design principles, templates, colors, typefaces, slides’ typography, use of photos and pictograms, composition rules and ways to create clear and meaningful charts and diagrams. This course is not a PowerPoint fundamentals course. You should have a basic knowledge of either Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote software. Don’t meddle, make your slides matter.

From the lesson

Part 4: Diagrams and data visualization

This week is about typography and photographic illustrations. Applying basic typography rules allows to make decent looking slides only with text. The same goes to tables. If that’s not enough there are icons — do’s and don’ts of them when you try to spruce up your text-only slides. And finally using photos and vector arts to create really gorgeous stunning slides. Basic rules on how to search them on photobanks, how to combine them with text, when icons should be used instead of photos and vice versa.

Types of diagrams6:58

Hierarchy diagrams4:27

Process diagrams6:47

Relationships diagrams6:52

Data visualizations3:25

Column and bar charts11:09

Line charts3:10

Pie charts5:35

Closing remarks2:03

Meet the Instructors

Alexei Kapterev
Lomonosov MSU BS

The last topic we're going to cover is data visualization.

Now, as you probably remember, tables of numbers are a bit annoying.

They are annoyance number four on DavidParody's,

list which has to do with financial presentations, but still.

So as much as possible we're trying to get away from tables with numbers.

And create graphs, charts, instead.

So, if you have a table like this,

what you probably should be doing is something like this.

And if you add a bit of manual labor, you will end up with something like this.

Which, I think, is a much better solution, for both you and your audience,

it takes slightly less time to digest compared to the table.

And you see all those differences between numbers visually,

which of course is a lot faster.

So with chart design, it's mostly fighting against PowerPoint or KeyNote defaults.

I don't know who's setting those defaults but most of the time,

they are just simply horrible, I have no other word.

This is what you get in PowerPoint.

This is what you get in KeyNote.

And once again you have to scroll through myriad of little menus and

uncheck all those nice check boxes that interface design has put in there.

In order to arrive to something like this, something simple,

easy to understand and clear.

Now some people still ask me what chart should I use in this or that case.

And the answer to this question is actually pretty simple.

According to PowerPoint there are nine different kinds of charts.

And 95% of all the digitization and

business are those top four kinds of charts.

I mean the rest are still legitimate kind of charts, but they work in very

narrow kinds of contexts and I invite you to think three times before using them.

Most of what you will be doing in business are column and bar charts,

which are the same, line charts or pie charts.

If you hear the word distribution this is a hint for you to use a pie chart.

If you hear the word trend this is a hint for you to use a line chart.

And bar charts or column charts are your default.

I don't know, 80% of all the visualization in business has to do with bar charts.

If you work in, I don't know, in advertising, and if you start to draw

media infographics, they will fire you the next day for bar charts.

You're not there to draw boring bar charts.

So yes, they are boring,

but also they are the most familiar to the audience, people get them.

So I actually most of the time would encourage you to use a bar chart or

a default chart.

Please do think three times before using, I don't know,

send key or whatever you're thinking about using.

I mean, this is kind of fun,

but you know how they say a picture is worth 1,000 words.

And this is one of those pictures which need 1,000 words to explain.

It's not like this is some illegitimate kind of a chart, but

it has a very narrow context of use.

So, let's begin with column and bar charts.