What’s wrong with this slide? [#1]

Jul 14, 2010 by AnaFxFz    6 Comments    Posted under: Presentations

Let’s just say that EVERYTHING is wrong with this slide! … And what’s up with the explosion call-outs!? Just plain ugly!

But before you start hitting your forehead on your monitor, let me just make a few things clear:

1) This slide was created by one of my clients using Powerpoint. Working exclusively with Powerpoint was one of the many requirements of this project.
2) Although it’s been a while, this project was under NDA, so I covered the logos and any identifiable product name with my “magic virtual tape”. ;P
3) This slide is part of a corporate presentation (do I need to say anything else?). Not only it carried all the “heaviness” of conservative corporate slides, but it was also for a financial pitch. I was hired to re-design a deck of approximately 40 slides like this. Actually, this was one of the “best” slides in the deck.
4) The client insisted that we had to keep ALL the elements of the original slides, including the bullet points.
5) Not only I had to run everything by the VP of Business Development, but also by their Creative Director, the guys of the financial department, and finally the CFO (which, by the way, would always change everything that everyone else had said). The feedbacks were always contradictory and consisted of really long emails with detailed comments for every single slide.

As you can see, there was not much I could do with this design besides cleaning! The first thing I did was to remove the template. I really dislike templates, but I have to admit that in some cases they work very well… Obviously, this was not one of those cases. The last thing you want in a deck of *very* busy slides is to use a template that will take a lot of valuable space and just make your presentation look dreadful.

The logo was moved from the bottom left to the top right corner of the page. It was also a different, more modern, logo.

As for the colors, I decided to go with a gradient of nature green and orange on white (matching this client’s line of products). As part of the cleaning process, I used a cut-out stylized font in dark gray. That way, I left the bright colors to the graphic elements that needed to be highlighted, while the title font was stressed by size and style. The font used was Sansation (free download here), which was one of the few things the client liked because it had a modern look and it was similar to their logo.

Now, the chart… ah the chart!! First of all, this should not be a columns chart. Second, there is no reason for the bullet points to be placed *inside* of the chart next to the columns. I changed the original graphic to a marked lines chart. In an attempt to keep it simple and clean, I used white color on the chart’s lines, which I made a little wider. Of course, white on white means nothing, so I added shadow to those lines to make them visible without adding an extra element that would confuse the viewers. I also used a nice 3d effect on the three markers. The orange arrows were needed to stress the decrease in production costs.

The ‘extra’ sentence in the bottom of the slide was put inside of a green box and the font was again highlighted by the cut-out effect. I would lose the bullet points, but that was not an option, so I separated them and hoped they would at least follow an animation of one bullet at a time.

So here is the slide redesigned:

It is not perfect, but I think it looks much better. Now would you like to know what is the best part? The feedback!! Here is the feedback I got for this slide, which I will tell you in my client’s own words: “We like the font of the titles. I need to add more text to this slide, I’ll send you the new bullet points later today. I am not sure I like the colors you used here, I think it would be better if you just stick to black, gray, and white. Please do not use 3d effects on the charts. Also, can you put the blue flow template back?”

[sigh... followed by several minutes of silence and sad face]

Please leave your comments, I would love to hear what other folks, designers or not, think about this. :)