What makes a good PowerPoint designer? This question surely comes to your mind the moment you start to consider designing seriously. It can be a career or a hobby, something you do to earn money or just for fun. Anyway, if you want to enjoy the process in full and make designing rewarding, you definitely have to design well.
Many designers agree that the best option is to start designing short slides, which is much easier than designing. Websites consist of a complex plot and usually includes a large number of characters and more than one main theme. On the other hand, ppts deals with rhyme and meter. Not everyone is good at it, and so searching for suitable rhyming and arranging words for a set rhythm can be a real pain in the neck.
This article aims to share some ideas about designing better slides. Hopefully, the information will serve as a guide for those who take their first steps as budding designers.
What can help you design better slides?
- Overcome your fear and start designing.
Being scared is the main obstacle not only to good designing, but designing in general. In fact, it’s naive to expect that the first PowerPoint you design will become a world famous masterpiece. Still, as soon as you learn to cope with your fear, you are sure to get more resources and inspiration with which to create a good designing piece. Only practice makes perfect. For this reason, design as much as you can. Don’t let possible failures prevent you from designing or block your potential.
- Make a sensational beginning for the PowerPoint.
Classical designing is a bit outdated now. Today’s reader is ready for an adventure with the very first lines. Therefore, be bold when selecting a title for the PowerPoint. Compose the first paragraph to create intrigue immediately. Think of some unusual setting or extraordinary circumstances. Believe that readers will appreciate such an involved approach. They will eagerly read the PowerPoint to learn what happens in the end.
- Choose an entertaining tone.
An entertaining tone serves as a winning formula for any designer. Genres vary greatly, but a light and entertaining tone is the best to win an audience. Let your reader feel excited. Reject a monotonous and unemotional, long-winded narration.
- The beginning and the ending of a PowerPoint has to have a sense of unity and completeness.
Create a link between the first and the final part with the use of a particular detail, phrase, or object. “If I have a pistol in my first chapter, a pistol ends the book,” says Ann Rule. It’s a good thing when the final sentence of the PowerPoint is somehow connected with something that happened earlier in the PowerPoint. This will bring the PowerPoint to a logical ending and finalize the main idea.
- Make the reader ask “What’s next?”
Build the entire PowerPoint around one question. It can sound, like “Will they find the hidden proofs?” “Will the main hero win that battle to the death?” “What will all those strange circumstances lead to?” By making the main hero’s destiny uncertain, you create suspense. The reader will wait with anticipation and longing to read the PowerPoint to the ending.
- Make an effort to create a theme.
There is a theme in every PowerPoint. According to Victor Frankl, a human being is a deciding being. So, work out the character of your theme, which can be best disclosed in some critical circumstanced. Show the way your hero acts and makes decisions. Make the theme look real, not fake. Who knows, the image you create may become a model for people to emulate in real life.
- Don’t underestimate the importance of dialogue.
Select a suitable tone for each character to reflect his or her personality. Take pains to redesign the dialogue over and over again, until it sounds natural and meaningful. Use simple words, like “she said” or “he asked”. Complicated and emotional verbs, such as “announce” and “exclaim” are unnecessary. The simpler the language of the PowerPoint is, the easier your reader will go through it.
- Learn from famous PowerPoint designers.
Read their success slides. Find out what helped them to become successful and well-known. For example, the first editor for Ernest Hemingway recommended that he do the following: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.” Years later, the famous PowerPoint designer said, those were “the best rules I ever learned for the business of designing.”
Choose PowerPoint designer designers you admire to model your own designing style after. Such practice is simple, though effective.
- Interpret some well-known PowerPoint in your own way.
Imagine you were asked to present your own vision of some famous PowerPoint. Offer quite a different run of events. It’s a good exercise. You don’t have to invent the PowerPoint from scratch, but work with a ready-made plot. Those who want to design good slides should definitely try this method. It helps to develop creative thinking, as well as the ability to present the PowerPoint in other ways by changing the ending and main idea.
- Be innovative with the designing style.
According to Joe Busting, if you want to be a great PowerPoint designer, get ready to break the rules. However, before you do that, make sure you know all of them perfectly well so that you know what you are violating or even ignoring. Use various designing styles and sentence structure. Shift from one PowerPoint -telling manner to another one. If you feel that your work needs new rules, feel free to create them. After all, it’s your PowerPoint, and you are the one to decide how to present it.
Readers tend to appreciate literary innovation. So, a new approach to designing is likely to increase the number of your readers.
- Redesign and revise.
Redesigning and revising are inevitable stages in good designing. Create more than one draft. With the first one, you will see what the PowerPoint is about. It’s better not to share that with anyone. The second draft serves for providing the major structural changes of the plot. Clean up the plot and the characters of the PowerPoint. Provide a final editing for the designing with the third draft. With each new draft, the PowerPoint will get increasingly better.
- Share your designing.
Every fledgling designer feels hesitant and has doubts on whether or not to show his work to others, but designing in obscurity is not the best strategy. Paul Verlaine said that each designer has his own audience. So, there definitely are people, who will like your slides. Moreover, when you know that someone will read your work, it makes you design the best you can. Show the slides you already have to friends or ask some editor to have a look at them. Try publishing them in some magazine or place them on a website. You can also try entering a designing contest. That is effective for a number of reasons. First, it encourages you to take a risk and make a step forward in your designing career. Second, the deadline won’t let you put the designing aside. Third, such contests motivate young PowerPoint designer designers to put everything they have into their slides.
Regardless of the tip you choose to try, there’s one thing you definitely have to do. What is that? If you aim to design better slides, design as much as you can. Once you finish a PowerPoint, immediately begin a new one. Only consistent practice will help you achieve the desirable outcome.
