Traditional vs Contemporary

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From the course by National Research Tomsk State University

Presentation skills: Designing Presentation Slides

88 ratings

National Research Tomsk State University

Presentation skills: Designing Presentation Slides

88 ratings

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 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 it 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 2: Templates and colors meaning

This week is about templates, colors and fonts. What's wrong with most templates? Which page decorations should you use to make your slide look beautiful? (None!) What information can we pass through the colors? How to choose a typeface? Does a proper typeface make all the difference? (Yes, it does).

What’s wrong with the templates7:20

Page decorations3:41

Colors meaning10:48

Colors: Black & White8:39

Colors: Yellow, Green and Blue6:37

Choosing a typeface9:11

Traditional vs Contemporary7:46

Warm vs Cool2:53

Meet the Instructors

Alexei Kapterev
Lomonosov MSU BS

Suppose we have two groups of people and to one we give a joke printed in Times and

to the second group we give the same joke printed in Arial.

Which group would find the joke funnier?

One of them would actually.

And I don't know, what's your guess?

But it's Times, the Times would find the joke up to 10% funnier.

And frankly, we have no clue why.

Our best guess is that well, Times is sharp and Arial is blunt, [LAUGH].

If you understand what I mean, right.

And we typically associate humor and wit with sharpness.

He has a sharp mind.

Yeah, I know, still plus 10% humor.

A typeface could communicate a concept of elegance, or a concept of weight.

For example,

we understand that the first word is heavier than the second one, right?

The first is heavy the second is elegant.

If we switch those two words it wouldn't feel right.

The first logo looks okay, the second one

looks suspicious there's something wrong with it, this is not temptation, right?

If we switch pictures, the first tractor would look wrong.

What kind of a tractor is that?

So yes, a typeface could be bound in a way.

It could be rugged.

So there, I don't know how that one works.

This is an experiment that I did dozens of times with my students.

I ask them given the choice which hotel would you prefer for

the same money and will always give me the same answer, it's number 4.

I know how that one works but most of them prefer to stay at the hotel

number 4 even though the difference is negligible, some might say.

I've manipulated the time because I know how those things worked.

So typography creates an emotional connection.

This kind of typography creates this kind of an emotional connection.

Different kinds of typography create this one is I don't care typography.

This is kind of very Swiss and mutual, still an emotional connection.

So what you need to do first is you need to

understand what emotion are you trying to convey.

What is your brand character and frankly this is the hardest part.

Once you figure that one out, the rest becomes, well a relatively trivial choice.

What emotions can you convey with a typeface.

There's no single answer to that question I'm afraid.

I prefer to teach it this way.

I usually to say that okay, there are traditional and contemporary typefaces and

therefore, one can communicate a sense of tradition, of sophistication,

of luxury, or a sense of being modern.

Therefore, probably cheaper but maybe more robust.

Things like that I think you get the idea.

And the second I mentioned is warmth.

One could be warmer or cooler.

I don't know how do you explain, warm meaning friendly, approachable.

Cool meaning aggressive, dominating, stuff like that.

So for example, I work for a fairly traditional institution,

Moscow State University.

So I have to be traditional but

at the same time, I want to be warm and approachable.

So I use an old style safe typeface,

which I'm about to explain to you in a second.

But for you the choice will be different.

Let me explain how the tradition is communicated, because this is an easy one.

Have a look at those two typefaces, the first one is

clearly much more traditional than the second one, I think we all Agree on that.

As a matter of fact, we can put lots and lots of typefaces on a spectrum.

Some of them being very traditional and therefore classical and

sophisticated, and complex and luxurious and basic.

And the other part being much more novel,

much more robust, simple, affordable stuff like that.

What makes the difference?

The obvious answer would be serifs.

Serifs, in case you don't know, are those pointy things at the ends of the letter S.

Well, the first letter S is clearly much more sophisticated than the second one.

The second one is just [SOUND], the first one is very exquisite, right?

So serifs is one answer.

And the big question that I'm always asked here is

can you use serif fonts in presentations?

Because most people dealing with presentations say, no, no,

no, you cannot use serif fonts.

And this used to be the right answer.

In the era where projectors had,

I don't know 600 to 800 resolution, this was probably true.

Because in low resolutions, projectors cannot display all those intricate

details, therefore well, just makes no practical sense to use serif fonts there.

But at the moment projectors are much more sophisticated.

And especially if you use big sizes,

I think you can perfectly use serif typefaces.

They do give your presentation a traditional look which might not be

good for your own case.

But this is not the only answer.

Let me give you an example.

Let me just quickly do something for you.

Have a look.

Did you see it?

The typeface stays, well, mostly the same.

I removed the serifs but the sense, the feeling of sophistication.

It just state, right?

So how did they do that?

The answer is contrast.

Contrast, in terms of typography is the difference between the thickest and

the thinnest stroke within one letter.

The first letter has quite high contrast, the second has a negligible contrast.

It has some contrast, but not too much, right?

And the more contrast you have, the more sophistication you have.

Let me just give that R even more contrast.

And wow, very sophisticated and not very readable but lots and lots of character.

This is actually a letter from a style called ART DECO.

Very sophisticated and expensive art style

from the early 20th Century.

So as a rule, if you have serifs, you have contrast.

But you can also have contrast without serifs.

And if you have both serifs and contrast, you have more sophistication.

It looks much more historical, much more traditional, much more stable,

much less risky.

If you don't have serifs, less contrast and it's robust,

it looks contemporary, it looks modern, it looks novel.

If you don't do any of these two things you just look neutral,

you just look readable.

What is the emotion that you are trying to communicate?

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