A short presentation of some of the most common "PowerPoint crimes". A great beginner's introduction to making visually effective slides!

1. How 2 Maike Terrable
PowerPoint Slidez
(Don’t do any of these things.)
C. M. Ernst

2. Crime #1: Too Much Text
(bullets can’t fix this amount of awful)
• This is something you should never, ever do, not in one hundred
thousand million years: present your audience with one giant block
of text.
• First of all, the text will probably be too small.
• If there is this much text on a slide, everyone will wonder why the
heck you are up there presenting a talk, when they could just be
reading a textbook. I mean, giving a talk is supposed to be about
talking, not reading. Am I right?
• If you have this much text on a slide you should either split it into
several slides, condense it into short bullet points (more to use as
cues for yourself than something for your audience to read), or get
rid of the text altogether and simply present an image, and talk
about it.
• In an ideal world (it’s difficult to achieve but not impossible) a
powerpoint presentation would look like a slideshow.

3. Crime #2 – Color Schemes
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Can you see what I wrote?
How about now?
Now?
No?
Always use strongly contrasting font &
background colours
– Light on dark
– Dark on light

4. Don’t use obnoxious colours
• Seriously, this is just painful
• I knew a guy who did this
• He thought it was awesome
• It was not

5. Don’t use distracting backgrounds either
• As a stand-alone picture, this is great
• As a background for text , this is terrible
Er, “terrible”

6. Crime #3 – What the…

7. Crime #4: Clip Art. No.

8. Crime #5 – Animation Overload
• Creativity is good
• You want to grab your audience’s attention
• But this is not the way to do it
– Distracting
– Annoying
• Use simple, consistent animations (if any)

9. CRIME #6: NO COMMITMENT
•Size
 colour
font
placement
• Choose one format and stick with it

10. Presentation Tips
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Know your material
Don’t read your slides
Speak loudly and clearly
Body language
Enthusiasm!