A consistent look and feel can be effective but boring. A fresh look for each slide can be confusing. Is there a middle ground?
The Birth of Presentation Slide Design Consistency
In the early days of PowerPoint, most presentation slide designs made use of master pages. This allowed the designer to make one master slide with, say, a logo in a corner, page numbers and a copyright on the bottom, some color and cute background, and a fixed font and point sizes for titles and bullet points. Then on each slide the creator would simply add an individual title and bullet points.
The Benefits of Slide Design Consistency
Every slide looked about the same, which had a great communication advantage. By having each slide share design elements, the audience focused on the things that changed from slide to slide. That is exactly the content that the creator wanted the audience to focus on. By subconsciously learning that the title was left-justified in 40 point Helvetica on the top, that a small graphic was on the lower right, etc, the audience became comfortable with the design. It’s almost the same phenomenon in brand marketing. For instance, the laundry detergent shopper knows the shape and color of the bottle means it’s Tide. You read the label only to see which type of Tide is in the container. The shape and color become comfortable to the shopper and no mental energy is needed to decipher it.
However, it didn’t take too many years for audiences to be bored silly with every presentation looking the same. Tools (PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides today) quickly evolved so that creators could add animation, transitions, builds, video, and a world of images, shapes, and sizes.
Today’s reaction – Freshness
Today, many designers give every slide it’s own look and feel, and no two slides having design elements in common. I see many decks today that don’t use master layouts but design each individual slide from scratch.
The upside of each slide having its own design is that each slide can be interesting to look at. However the downside is that the audience has to decipher the design of each slide in addition to the content of the slide, and that takes mental energy away from understanding the content.
The Happy Medium
So is there a happy medium, a balance of the freshness of a new look along with enough consistency that the audience can focus on the content and not the design?
I think so, and here are some design suggestions to strike such a balance.
- Create several master layouts with similar background and design elements, but with a few changes to the elements. For instance, the core design could be a lightly colored checkerboard, but each permutation has one corner of the checkerboard in bold and the title varying from left to center to right justified.
- Similarly, the core content of the slide could vary from a few pre-designed layouts. For instance, straight bullet points, or phrases in boxes, circles, or within icons.
- Once in the presentation, a slide with a completely different design is used. For instance, one large background image that relates to the content of that page such as a photo of an ice cream cone on the slide that lists the product flavors. Used sparingly, the radically different design can attract attention.
- Consistently using two or three complementary fonts (for instance font one for titles, font two for content, font three for captions) but not a random assortment of fonts.
The entire idea is to have each slide look fresh, yet have a consistent set of design elements. Thus, the audience builds familiarity with the design language and can focus on the content.
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