Materials Development Area (MDA) Poster Guidelines

Materials Development Area (MDA)

PowerPoint Slide Design Guidelines

Keep slides simple
Keep colors, patterns, and text styles consistent for all slides in a presentation
Limit slides to six lines of text, with six words in a line
A mix of upper and lower-case is easier to read that all caps
The text must be easy to read from the last row of your audience
Use no more than three sizes of lettering per chart
Be consistent in type size throughout the presentation
Avoid ornate type styles
Light colored text against a dark background works best
Color can be used to highlight a point but don't get carried away in a wash of color

Excerpt from “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” by Edward R. Tufte. (Graphics Press, 2003)

What to do about PowerPoint
Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that claimed to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: making us stupid, degrading the quality and credibility of our communication, turning us into bores, wasting our colleague’s time. These side effects, and the resulting unsatisfactory cost/benefit ratio, would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.

Improving our Presentations
Presentations largely stand or fall depending on the quality, relevance and integrity of the content. The way to make big improvements in a presentation is to get better content.

Designer formats will not salvage weak content. If your numbers are boring, then you you’ve got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won’t make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.

At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm to the content. Yet again and again we have seen that the PP cognitive style routinely disrupts, dominates and trivializes content. PP presentations too often resemble the school play: very loud, very slow and very simple.

The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manger and projector for low-resolution materials. And that’s about it. PP has some occasionally useful low-end design tools and way too many Phluff tools. No matter how beautiful your PP ready made template is, it would be better if there were less of it. Never use the PP templates to format paper reports of web screens. Use PP as a projector for showing low-resolution color images, graphics, and videos that cannot be reproduced as printed handouts at a presentation.

Paper handouts at a talk can effectively show text, data graphics, images. Printed materials, which should largely replace PP, bring information transfer rates in presentations up to that of everyday material in newspapers, magazines, books and internet screens. A useful paper size for handouts a presentation is 11 by 17 inches, folded in half to make 4 pages. This piece of paper can show images with a resolution of 1,200 dpi and up to 60,000 characters of words and numbers, the content-equivalent of 50 to 250 PP slides of text and data. Thoughtfully planned handouts at your talk tell the audience that you are serious and precise; and that you seek to leave traces and have consequences. And that you respect your audience.

In day-to-day practice, PowerPoint templates may improve 10% or 20% of al presentations by organizing inept, extremely disorganized speakers, at a cost of detectable intellectual damage to 80%. For statistical data, the damage levels approach dementia. Since about 10¹⁰to 10¹¹PP slides (many using templates) are made each year, that is a lot of harm to communication with colleagues. Or at least a big waste of time.

The damage is mitigated since meetings relying on the PP cognitive style may not matter all that much. By playing around with Phluff rather than providing information, PowerPoint allows speakers to pretend that they are giving a real talk, and the audiences to pretend that they are listening. This prankish conspiracy against substance and thought should always provoke the question, Why are we having this meeting?