… be a voice.
Random templates
It’s all too easy in presentations to fall back on the ‘standard’ ways of doing things… templates and formulae. There isn’t anything wrong with either of these ideas in principle (and in fact they’re very useful when you’re short of time, for example) but there are quite a few fairly significant downsides:
- they’re boring – slides that all look the same look the same! It looks like you’ve not put the effort in, that you’ve not got the imagination or (worse) than you just don’t care. Why would I want to listen to someone who couldn’t be bothered to make their presentation a little bit more interesting than just opening up a formula/template file?
- they’re corporate – obviously there’s nothing wrong with ‘corporate’ per se but it risks automatically putting certain things in your audience’s minds. If you look corporate, they expect corporate and – often – that means they tend towards being a bit more skeptical as a result
- they’re rubbish – it is possible to get a good template, of course it is. I’m sure it is. Yes, it must be. By the law of averages there must be a good one out there. Definitely, If I just keep looking…
- they’re limiting – most of the ones I’ve seen are based around bullet points… which, as we know, don’t work! It’s not the designer’s fault necessarily, because – let’s face it – what else can you put in a slide template. Pictures and anything interesting/original aren’t template-able (is that a real word?).
With all that in mind, are there any good points?
Sure. Some!
- they’re quick and they’re safe. If you’ve got an internal presentation to make and your PR department dictate you use something they’ve created its a Career Limiting Move to do something different and better. Sometimes playing the corporate game is the only way to go
- they avoid the worse excesses of stupidity (usually) – most of the ones I’ve seen recently have a reasonable choice of font and an acceptable font size. At the very least templates avoid the put-a-printed-document-on-the-screen-in-12-point-TimesNewRoman-font!
- they’re professional – at least whoever created it will almost certainly have sorted out the problems of hideous, clashing colours. White text on a pale pink background might look sexy to the amateur but not professional is going to let that happen. Are they?
- they’re re-useable – if you’ve got a good enough one, you can re-use it. But see the note above about being lazy!
The template-buster, to me, is that they’re templates. Obvious as it may seem, just being a template is a bad thing. They try and do a one size fits all design and, frankly, that doesn’t wash.
Let’s say you want to make a presentation to explain a problem and look at possible solutions.
Firstly, the difference between a problem and a solution is so significant that I can barely imagine a template which can do both with impact and elegance. Add to that the need to differentiate between alternative possible solutions and you’ve got another problem.
But even then the horror isn’t over! Why should one solution be similar enough to another to mean that the best way of explaining them both is for (not only slides, but) nearly identical slides?!
The key point is this.
When you’re designing a slide ask yourself what is the best way to design this slide to get the contents over?
Then design that slide in that way.
If two slides happen to come out similarly, then that’s great. On the other hand if they come out very different, that’s probably even better.
It’s all about the message – and getting it over – not about the amount of template-prettiness!
It’s a simple (oh, so very simple) concept it should be self-evident. But it isn’t. Not if the amount of presentations I see with corporate templates is anything to go by!
