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Basic Principles of Powerpoint Hygiene
Basic Principles of Powerpoint Hygiene
PowerPoint is a good idea in principle, but in order to get the advantage of the technology it’s important to follow some
simple rules of visual hygiene.
To make colors to stand out, one can draw on the long experience of centuries of painting. Using black, white and
primary colors is what children do when they start painting but as adult artists they learn, eventually, that the bright
colors all cancel each other out, so that in the end, nothing stands out. The image starts to look like "Times Square by
night", everything competing generally unsuccessfully for our attention. If you want colors to "stand out" and "sing", then
you may need to be thinking about slightly tinted neutral backgrounds, with the colors subtly matched with each other,
perhaps using a color wheel to think about what goes with what.
Think of Rembrandt or Titian or Corot. Then if one can get the colors matched against neutral backgrounds, even without
getting the aesthetic level of the great painters, then your chosen colors have more of a chance to leap out at the viewer,
emphasizing the thing you want to emphasize and deemphasizing the rest as background.
Another subliminal turnoff in Powerpoint is the use of flat colors. Nothing in nature has a flat color. Everything is shaded
in textures and gradient hues. The only thing in our lives that have flat colors are manufactured objects like plastic. So
when you show a Powerpoint slide with flat colors, as opposed to textures and gradients, then the audience may be
subliminally thinking - this slide is, or is about, manufactured, plastic, unreal things. Shifting to color gradients, and
sometimes textures, if done with care and taste, can create a more human image - and response.
· Get attention
· Stimulate desire
· Reinforce with reasons
The object should be to have a slide deck that it is easy for the audience themselves to re-use at a later time to
communicate the presenter’s message to a new audience. This is achieved by building the story into the slides and
making the slides as self-explanatory as possible.
Instead of “customers find the store is more helpful to their shopping needs”
Say: “Anne Haines, a mother of two in Boise Iowa finds the store to meet her needs in furnishing her house.” Stories
personalize the point and make it more vivid.