Having working in the conference industry for many years we’re seen our fair share of PowerPoint presentations. Both good and bad! Being a member of Social Zesh member for a while now it made sense for us to help Martin Reynolds come up with a functional PowerPoint Slide Master. As part of our project to edit and refine the existing back catalogue of Social Zesh social media training videos it was easy for us to see how a structured PowerPoint Slide Master could improve Martins continuity in presentations.
Let the Slide Master take the stain
PowerPoint as really change for the last couple of decades and doesn’t have the what can only be described as “over the top” effects of a certain presentation platform we could mention. But a few of the updates have really made PowerPoint the go to tool for presentations. The slide master setup will allow you to configure how layouts will function to compliment your brand and ease of slide production. We used this to great effect with the Social Zesh template with crucial elements built it for Laptop and mobile devices so Martin could simple click the add media button and screen shots will sit neatly on the slide. No more jumping around the screen.
As the saying goes “Size Matters”
As we live in a UHD world these days the first thing we do is create a slide size to suite a 4K resolution so if a slide based edit is required there will be no upscaling going on. Font sizes are all set for headings, body text and other text elements. Placement of text on slides can make or break a presentation. There’s nothing worse than seeing headers jumping around the screen and text sizes changing to cram more copy in.
KISS (Keep it simple stupid) is a good rule of thumb. No one did it better than Apple founder Steve Jobs in his Mac World presentations. Simple clean backdrop with the minimalist amount of text or even no text at all so the focus was always on him.
