Slide Make-over: EPA Greenversations
For my previous slide make-over, I gave a slide deck presented by the Coast Guard at a Web 2.0 workshop. This facelift targets a deck presented by the EPA at the same workshop. The issues were different this time and unfortunately, the "Greenversations At A Glance" slide deck was typical of what I see on a regular basis. Not only are the slides text-heavy, but they're also very content-rich. Too rich, in my opinion.
As you can see, there's a lot to read. The audience can't possibly be expected to read all this and absorb what the speaker is trying to share. The story was important and of great value. It's just too bad the slides hurt her efforts.
Below is my effort at redesigning the deck.
As you can see, the deck shrank in half from 22 slides to 11. Much of the content on the slides were details that didn't need to be on slides. Even coming up with visual metaphors for each slide or each chunk of content on the slides would have been too much. The presentation is what she was up in front saying to us in the audience, not her slides. I'll address each of the new slides and what I did and why I did it. As always, please feel free to add your comments below.
- Title Slide - I decided to follow a similar path on the title slide that I took with the Coast Guard make-over. The difference here is the title and subtitle are moved up to take advantage of extra space and take advantage of the rule of thirds. For this deck, I used Keynote's "Showroom" template. I did tweak it a little bit, though, to make it more appropriate for the subject material and to try to avoid the "I've seen that before" that you get when using built-in templates. The green line ties in with the environmental theme of the Greenversations blog. I added a reflection to give it a little more thickness without overdoing it.
- Agenda Slide - For this and subsequent slides, I carried on the line from the title slide. The agenda items, rather than being bullets in a list, were instead represented by conversation bubbles. This too was an attempt to reinforce the theme of the blog. The agenda items are brought in one at a time, allowing for commentary and for the focus of the audience to be squarely on what the presenter is addressing at the moment.
- Slide 3 - In this slide, you can see an alternative approach to the standard and unimaginative slide title. Instead of having slide-specific titles, I brought the conversation bubbles from the agenda slide to the bottom of the slide and adjusted the opacity to keep the focus on the content and not the bubbles. For the "Why?" slide, I decided to focus on her message of putting "a human face on the big blank box (government)."
- Slide 4 - This slide focuses on the organizational structure that they have for managing their blog. Though crude and simple, this reinforces the message better than a few slides of text.
- Slide 5 - When it comes to the important message of encouraging bloggers to reply to comments on their posts, a simple, straight-forward photograph accomplishes this. A little bit of text in a caption reinforces this.
- Song of the Coqui - Easily my favorite slide in this deck, this replaces slide 10 in the original deck. Using a photograph that goes to the edges and shows the face of the frog has far more impact than the embedded photograph looking down on the frog's back. The commentary was distilled down to concise points that minimizes reading. Again, the details will be in what the speaker's saying.
- Weekly Features Slide - This slide needs more work. However, it's a good start at getting away from the text-heavy original. Spacial representations work well for time-based information.
- Flow of the River - This slide's design is similar to the Coqui slide for visual consistency. Though the image isn't the one she talked about in her presentation (the original was way too small), that's not as important as having a visual to reinforce what she is talking about.
- Policy & Legal Slide - Here, I'm going for humor. I'm not going for the laughs (or chuckles) at the beginning of the presentation, but rather at about the 10 minute mark when the brain starts struggling with paying attention to the current presentation. This little shift in gears grabs the audience's attention anew, buying the speaker more time to get through the talk. Now, humor isn't something that should be used haphazardly. If the joke isn't relevant, then you can easily lose your audience.
- Comment Policy Slide - This is one of those slides where I'm using a bulleted list without bullets. A list works for what she's trying to get across, but if you can, avoid using bullets themselves. This keeps the slides clean and you avoid those lethal bullets.
- Last slide - Here, the audience gets to see the blog with the contents of two slides condensed to one slide and three "bullets."
All photographs are credited in the slide notes. For the subject matter of the presentation:
As I mentioned earlier, please feel free to comment on my slide make-over and/or suggest alternative approaches in the comments area below.
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.
