PowerPoint Review

Last year, for a class on software engineering, I worked with 4 other students to turn in a team PowerPoint deck for our final project, and the largest portion of our grade in that class. The requirements for the deck represented the culmination of our work over the course of the semester.

The teacher commented how this was one of, if not the best presentation he'd seen while teaching that course. At the time I chalked this up to my own experience as a graphic designer, and I wore that compliment as a feather in my cap, since I had been the one to design the whole of the artwork and theme for the final project.

Now, two years later, I've finally taken the time to dive deeper into what actually constitutes a good PowerPoint deck. And I am already met immediately with concepts that would have not only helped me improve the existing deck, but would have also helped me connect with the project better from the start.

Here's just a little of what I've learned, after going back this afternoon and reviewing my old deck...

The Small Stuff

Let's begin with the little details. Things like: hierarchy, space, patterns and color. Right off the bat I created the theme for this deck at the worst possible time: at the very beginning of the class. I was manufacturing slide layouts and color themes based on the aesthetics of our group brand, not on what the message or audience for the final project would be. I mocked up 5 dummy slides, and boy do they need some fixin:

Immediately slides 4 & 5 are the same. Sure, there's a smaller header on one, but what contrast am I creating in this design? There's instant habituation creep. Secondly, the big green "chapter header" slide I mocked up was glaringly different from the rest of the slide theme, so jarringly so it goes beyond contrast into just being off. It doesn't suggest a hierarchy, it just doesn't fit into one.

I like what I was going for with the title slide, but the background noise of the glue bottle and the scissors ended up straddling the line between "lots of detail blurring to a background" and "simple objects highlighting the white space and creating a flow." I think what I would do first is fix that so there are fewer dotted lines with variable opacities, and change the top left and lower right corners to feature smaller, muted versions of the scissors and glue - both moving along the dotted line, not just swirling in space amidst them. Less Cubist Clutter, more Instruction Manual Highlights.

These elements were all I had to start with, given that we created our 'brand' and logo before we even knew what the overall project would contain. In the real world, however, you don't learn your job as you help your first client (hopefully, typically, right?). So there is some room to forgive me here, I was literally building a small business on a concept I had not learned nor practiced yet.

Even still, I use a lot of Red Text in this theme. Slap my wrist for that one. And while we're on the topic of Hues: I now know how to better create a custom color palette, which would have made some of the "variations on a theme" part of the process go much more casual.

The Big Stuff

Now let's get into the real issues here. I did create this theme and deck before I knew what we were about, so it won't surprise you that I failed to take into account The Big Three: Audience, Environment, and Message, and the greatest of these is Message.

What I should have considered in regard to Audience and Environment is that my teacher would be watching this alone from his office or home. This was an entirely online course, we were to submit a video or a powerpoint with audio narration that plays in presentation mode.

We found a simple enough way to break out the final presentation so that building the narrative was easy - we just broke the topics into sections, each chose a section that we would narrate individually, and then recorded the presentation one slide at a time, sending the file to the next person in line. To really bring this home I created On Brand Avatars for each member of the team, which would be placed in the upper right hand of every slide, showing who was talking.

But what if I was building this today? What would I change, even knowing this process would be a constraint in the final build?

First, I'd make these changes in light of the Audience and Environment - the goal was two fold: build a deck as if we were a software startup presenting how we would build the Phone App for a fictional company called "HairWeGo," designed to send mobile hair stylists to a location for a quick haircut (unnervingly prescient). But the deck also had to show that we'd comprehended and covered our new skillset with software development.

In that regard I would just freely make that an aspect of the design! There would be two themes, one would be the On Brand for our Group (Cut and Paste) version, where the audience is our teacher. We would speak directly to him as one who must evaluate our understanding of the concepts in the deck. Each section of the presentation, then, would end with a slide or two that was On Brand for the fictional "HairWeGo" company. We would speak as if presenting to a real world client, showing how we could explain the concept to a normal person.

More practically, given the environment this would be viewed in, each slide needed to have few words and quick transitions. This wasn't something that was going to have a handful of important bullets the audience would be jotting down. This was just a captivating look into how much we've learned. The audience, in this case, already knows what we're 'teaching,' he just needed to make sure we did it right.

Strangely enough, I think you could then say that the Message is the same for both! While the first set of slides could approach the message from the angle of "this is my understanding of this element" the second set could demonstrate how we would explain that to a client in layman's terms. Together this really nails down what we want our audience to take away.

I would focus on chronological order, making it clear to the 'client' half of the slides the how of how we were going to build this software. And during the 'client' half I would also use a lot more contrast in the steps showing the actual screenshots of the app.

I went through painstaking process of creating a look that was on brand, immaculate, and had excellent flow - only to run out of time before I could go back and add color. The final version of this would really, really pop if every explanation of the walkthrough had the phone screen highlighted in color during that step. Repeated grey and static screens, unfortunately, really contributes to habituation and boredom.

Overall, I'm proud of the work I did putting this together, but I can see a LOT of room to improve this deck. In the future, these simple tenets - a firm understanding of the Audience, Environment, and Message, a grasp of the methods that deploy that message using Hierarchy, Space, Similarity, and Color - will improve my execution ten fold.