5 easy ways to create fabulous slides

Five easy ways
to create
fabulous slides
@theREALwikiman

(Because bad slides make people switch off, and good slides make people switch on. So why not make a nice deck? Especially when it’s so easy.)
Say NO to Death by PowerPoint…

METHOD ONE
choose a simple colour scheme (and stick with it)

this one is really simple
use a plain background (either white or
black) and then pick a nice font in two complimentary colours.

two colours of a related hue…
… works particularly well on a white background

OR TRY A BLACK BACKGROUND
A bold headline colour with grey body text works well here.

THE KEY TO METHOD ONE
Is picking a nice font, picking a nice colour scheme, positioning your text boxes well and just producing slides in a consistent style.

FONTS
Avoiding Times New Roman and Comic Sans helps. But keep in mind, Calibri changes size on Slideshare – it gets bigger when you upload your slides.

METHOD ONE
Is very simple, extremely quick, and quite nice. It takes about 5% more time than just basic black on white slides, but looks much, much better.
(And it beats using any of PPT’s templates any day.)

METHOD TWO
one texture, many colours

This is the second simplest way to make decent-looking slides.
Just grab a textured image off Flickr Creative Commons to act as your background.

Then use Format > Recolour to make it a different colour for each slide.

Use an attractive font, make the words nice and big, avoid too much text per slide, credit the person whose texture you used – and that’s it! Easy.

METHOD THREE
The two-toned textured slide

STEP 1:
Again, find a nice texture from Flickr’s Creative Commons. This one needs to be simpler – less busy – than in the previous method.

STEP 2:
We’ll be using Format > Recolour again – choose a colour for the title section of your background first of all.

more STEP 2
Then copy and paste your background image, and recolour the 2nd version something nice – something which compliments the first version.

STEP 3
Crop the first image so it takes up the top quarter or third of the slide, then crop the second image so it takes up the remainder. Move them into position, one above the other.

STEP 4
Choose some clear fonts, and colour the title text to mirror the body background, and body text to mirror the title background. (Like on these very slides.)

STEP 5
Experiment with different colour combinations...

more STEP 5
...until you find one you’re happy with. Remember to credit the person whose background texture you’ve used. That’s it!

METHOD FOUR: background images

I’m going back to method one…
…to explain this one, because Method Four doesn’t work so well with lots of text.
Method Four is sometimes known as ‘found flickr slides’ – it consists of finding appropriate copyright cleared images from Flickr that provide some kind of visual metaphor for what you’re trying to say, and then putting a text box over the top with some minimal text in.

More on Method Five
It’s a ‘one point per slide’ method that works very well for live presentations and slightly less well for online ones, because so much is left unwritten.
I’ll be using some random nice pictures as examples in the next few slides, but generally speaking you’d be looking to match picture to content. I’ve put in a few obvious examples of that in a few slides’ time (slides 35-37).

Step 1 is to find a suitable picture

You can search Flickr Creative Commons (click to go there) – I often prefer to use Blue Mountains which collects together a lot of really good CC Flickr images and gets rid of some of the dross

Once you’ve found one you like, right-click on your Slide then select Format Background, then either Insert from: File to load an image you’ve saved, or Insert from: Clipboard to paste an image you’ve copied

Step 2 is to Insert > Text Box and write your caption

Sometimes you can write
directly on to the slide

But usually you’ll need to fill the textbox to make the text readable. Right-click the text box, go to Format shape, then Fill > Solid Fill. White is usually best. Black can work.

One the same screen, experiment with the ‘transparency’ slider to make the box slightly see-through. This one is at 40%.

It’s nice to match text colour with something in the image

Your text box doesn’t have to stretch all the way across each slide, don’t forget

If there’s a portrait (rather than landscape) image you really want to use, fill the slide black and then paste the image over the top of one side.
Then write on the other side in complimentary colour, like this.

Now for some examples of obvious
Visual metaphors

This is a global issue

It’s time for change

etcetc

Method FIVE
The augmented white slide…

Perhaps the
trickiest
method

But also the most
rewarding.

For this method, you need pictures which are ‘transparent’ – in other words, they have no background colour so they fit seamlessly into otherwise white slides.

A hand holding a card is always a nice one to use…

Notepads and journals with stuff written on them work well

no two slides
are the same
this method takes longer partly because

and because it’s harder to find
the right images

all the images in this section are from Stock Xchange, which contains loads of high-quality, royalty free images
http://www.sxc.hu

Okay, that’s it for now. Hope you found the tips useful.

Making good slides is worthwhile, and reaching people via Slideshare allows you to extend the impact of your presentation all across the web.
(The five most viewed slide-decks I have on here have been viewed by more than 75,000 people. That makes the time I put into them more worthwhile!)

Background texture for Method 2:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/friendbrook/4609242096/sizes/l/in/photostream/
Background texture for Method 3:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zooboing/4182512221/sizes/o/in/photostream/
Method 4
Trees: http://www.flickr.com/photos/99771506@N00/2981387336
Lighthouse: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dexxus/3996683276/sizes/z/in/photostream/
Mountain: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/2746960560/sizes/l/in/photostream/
Tubes: http://www.flickr.com/photos/j-ster/369387948/sizes/o/in/photostream/
Night scene: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3320/3243537014_469efd744a_b.jpg
Coastal scene: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5173/5499821986_480503577d_b.jpg
Doors: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7578081@N07/2249968851
Café: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dexxus/2909924543/sizes/z/in/photostream/
Table and bottle: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johncohen/55582632/sizes/z/in/photostream/
Lampost: http://www.flickr.com/photos/34726560@N00/3001834479
Globe: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3646/3522310843_d259114297_b.jpg
Clock: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/68/190101132_a654931331_b.jpg
Dice: http://www.sxc.hu
Method 5
Slides, rubix cube, tree-shoot, picture frame, hand holding card notepad, post-it note, leaves, negatives, laptop, stop sign and this film reel pic:
all via Stock Xchange(http://www.sxc.hu)

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5 easy ways to create fabulous slides

by Ned Potter

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