Rant mode on….
What is it about the (free) powerpoint templates that makes them so bad? Do (probably otherwise good) designers sit there and think to themselves “I’m going to give this one away, so I’ll deliberately make it suck!”?
Okay, maybe I’m over-reacting, but time and time again I find that people come to us with presentations they’ve “written” using a free template they downloaded and we pretty much have to start over from the beginning. To be honest, if we were getting paid to design the slides that wouldn’t be so bad, but we’re supposed to be helping people learn how to to use the slides in their presentation.
I’ve written (ranted?) elsewhere about the vagaries of templates and the fact that they seem to be written to show off the technical abilities of the designer rather than show of the content of the presentation, but one I’ve seen recently takes the biscuit. Not only does it have a ‘busy’ background, in the same colour as the foreground, but it takes that one stage further and has a moooooooooving background.
Fascinating.
Actually, to be honest, it’s quite clever and I had to get hold of it to look at how they’d done it… but that’s the point – I was interested in the background, not the content.
Our homepage has our take on this. We try and think of the presentation as the container, not the content. Think of a whisky glass if you like – it can be a thing of beauty in its own right, sure, but the real reason for the glass is to get the whisky to your mouth. (If you don’t like whisky, think wine-glass or coke-tin for all I care! :) )
Too many templates have the equivalent of a very pretty lid on the whisky glass – it looks fantastic but it gets in the way of the pleasure of drinking the whisky.
Besides, why would you want a template that looked like everyone else…?
We could say that layout is what designers squeeze into available technology — content is the culture manifested in the layout. “Space’ is the envelope holding layout and content together.