Slide Make-Over: US Coast Guard
Last month, I attended the Government Web 2.0 Best Practices Workshop hosted by FEMA. As you would expect from events such as this, there were presentations given that included PowerPoint slides. Given my experience, the federal government is a fertile breeding ground for poorly designed and down-right ineffective slides. This event did not disapoint. As you would expect, using slides from where I work would not be a career-enhancing move. However, the event organizers’ decision to make the slide decks available to participants a couple weeks ago gave me just what I needed to share with you a slide make-over.
The subject of this make-over is the slide deck presented by the US Coast Guard. I have included the slides below so that you can see what we dealt with in the audience.
The presenter obviously meant well. However, the slides didn’t help his presentation. Next up is my attempt at improving the design of the deck.
Since this is fortunately a small deck (4 slides), I’ll go slide-by slide and explain what I did and why. Feel free to comment and offer alternative ideas in the comments.
- The Title Slide – This title slide represents what must be a “corporate” template that the presenter used. If he is forced to use this template, then my suggestion would be to try to encourage the powers that be to consider a redesign. My swipe at this takes the background image from one of their blogs and repurposes it for the background in the slides. In slides after the title slide, I adjusted the opacity of the image to 25% so that it could serve as subtle branding that didn’t get in the way of the content. I also kept with simple black text with the Gill Sans typeface. I didn’t include the Department of Homeland Security logo on any slides because I just didn’t feel that it was necessary. Frankly, I don’t think the audience cared that they were a component of the DHS, nor do I think they found that interesting.
- Social Media Tools Slide – This slide, in its original form, was a bulleted list that was displayed in its entirety at once. What was even more striking was the choice of colors. Orange and red just are not readable on a blue background. To tackle this page, I used a couple approaches. For the blogs, I created a single (instead of 3) bulleted list without bullets. The main reason for this was that I could not access some of their blogs. At least one was restricted to Coast Guard personnel. It also illustrates a good way to use bulleted lists when you just can’t avoid using them.
By removing the bullets, I removed visual pollution that can also spur emotional responses like, “oh, here we go,” or “Please. Spare me the list.” Warranted or not, bullets invoke dread in many and set certain unkind expectations of your presentation.
In addition to removing the bullets, each item appears on the screen one at a time, allowing the speaker to keep the audience on the item they’re currently discussing.
For Twitter, I copied the most recent tweet as a screen shot. Next, I removed the background and pasted it on the slide. This provided a sample of a typical uscoastguard tweet in a clean fashion.
The next three items on the slide got their own slides as well and this time used screen shots of a portion of the Web pages. Using a picture frame stroke around them allowed me to illustrate the fact that it’s not a full screen capture and still be visually appealing. - Lessons Learned Slide – This slide was broken up into multiple slides as well, given how there were multiple ideas on the original slide. The first one was a challenge and what I came up with was to still use text, but arrange it in a way that, in my opinion, is more visually appealing and is easier to grasp.
The next slide was an attempt to emphasize the point using text size. Smaller text for “Small Staff” and larger, bolder text for “Significant Impact.” The larger text also appeared as a build step, allowing for a minor dramatic effect for greater impact.
The next three slides use full-bleed images and a little text to illustrate the point at hand more effectively than bullet points. Two are from the Flickr Creative Commons collection (with credit given) and one is from the Coast Guard’s own Flicker photostream. - Twitter Slide – This slide didn’t make sense and really didn’t help him with his presentation, so “when in doubt, leave it out.”
As I mentioned earlier, please feel free to comment on my slide make-over and/or suggest alternative approaches in the comments area below.