«Design should not dominate things, should not dominate people. It should help people. That's its role.»
Dieter Rams, industrial designer, Braun consumer products lead designer 1962-1995
The first book I read about design was Design for Non-Designers. Its author, Robin Williams, clearly demonstrated how the main principles of design work and how they affect our perception of information. As examples, he used things familiar to everyone: business cards, booklets, webpages, invitations, etc.
But nothing was said about the presentations, although these principles also apply to slides. In this article I will show how this works for presentations.
If you place elements close to each other, people will think that they are related.
Randomly located objects create chaos and confusion.
Elements that are significantly different from the others always attract attention.
Repetitive design elements create a consistency of style.
Now let's proceed to our presentation. With its help, we\ll show how three of these principles work: proximity, alignment and contrast. I'll bring up repetition several times, and then will tell you about it at the end of the article.
Let's go!
The alignment principle is already in use here - the text is aligned to the left, along one vertical. This brings order to the slide.
But sometimes it is worth exploring different options, for example, aligning the text to the right.
Moving on to the contrast. The elements that stand out among others always catch the eye Let's try to select the objects that should attract our attention.
In this case, they are text and illustration:
This slide does not have enough contrast. The image strongly catches the eye, and a gray spot forms on the side. We can apply contrast to the header to fix this:
Let's start with the proximity. In this case, you should separate the text blocks:
The next step is alignment.
Now, adding some contrast to the headings and subheadings:
The slide looks nicely. However, it would make sense to upscale the image, because there is enough space on the slide:
Adding a repetition:
Note that we did not change the style of the main text, it stays the same from the first to the last slide. Repetition of text styles - font and its outline, color, size - helps to make the presentation complete, and not just a mash-up of slides.
First, let's bring the text on this slide to order.
The principle of proximity helps to relate clues and their explanations.
Adding some contrast to subheadings:
You can align the text to the left to make it more readable:
Obviously, the image is too small. and by upscaling it, we apply two principles at once - proximity and contrast:
Adding an image can save the situation.
I have found pictures of hats in a style similar to the story, and drew a hanger myself. I did this without leaving PowerPoint, just by using figures. You can use this method when you need to represent something simple, and searching in the Internet does not give you anything.
As a result, the slide looks like this:
In this version, the text looks more related to the image than in the previous. Now the outline of the image and the invisible line to which the text is aligned are parallel and there is a conceptual connection between them.
The original slide has a clear drawback - the illustration "does not work".
The image immediately began to do its job - to evoke emotions and trigger the memory. The text is read much easier, because I have adjusted the length of the line and the line spacing.
Always try to allocate a lot of space for images. Small images do not bring out any emotions, but only take up space on the slide.
I have saved this principle for dessert. Its action is difficult to evaluate on a separate slide, because it is observed throughout the presentation in such details as the font, image style or some repeating detail.
Stylistics of illustrations - pencil-drawn pictures. You will not find here images of a different style, it would violate the harmony. You should always set a rule to follow in your presentations. And, of course, do not be afraid of violating this very rule????
To show the effect of the repetition principle, my first idea was to place an illustration of a smoking pipe on the slides. But when I once again put it next to the last letter of one of the headings, I thought that it was interesting to turn this letter to an advantage on each slide, not necessarily with a pipe:
Not all slides follow the rule as easily as with a magnifying glass. On some letters, I spent more than an hour, without taking into account time spent looking for the image. For example, here is what happened to this slide:
Almost the same amount of time I spent on this slide:
The result is worth the time, I think:
In the article we examined 4 basic design principles:
1. Proximity - if you want the elements to be perceived as a whole, arrange them side by side.
2. Alignment - to create and maintain order in presentations, place the elements according to your own specific rules.
3. Contrast - if you want to draw attention to an element, make it visibly different from the others.
4. Repetition - do not forget that the style of presentation involves the repetition of some elements of style throughout the presentation.
These guidelines will help you make your slides more professional. You may be going back to this article or Robin Williams's book at first, but very soon you will stop thinking about the principles that were used or missed. This will happen automatically.
Let's see how the basic principles of design changed the original presentation.
Let us help you highlight your product to its best advantages.
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