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PowerPoint:
the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
By Hillary Boulden
I’ve got a secret
for you. Art directors may say they don’t know PowerPoint, but it’s
only to avoid using it as a design tool. Of course, I don’t recommend lying
to coworkers or clients, so here’s some insight for the typical PowerPoint
user. Please, no matter what you read here, promise me no hard feelings.
It’s funny to think
that a black & white program created for Macintosh in 1987 could have changed
the way we do business today, but there’s no denying it now. According to
Microsoft (which acquired PowerPoint and launched its first version in 1990),
at least 30 million PowerPoint presentations are created daily. “There are
tracts of corporate America where to appear without PowerPoint would be vaguely
pretentious, like wearing no shoes,” Ian Parker points out in his article
Absolute PowerPoint.
Chances are, of those 30
million presentations, about 29 million put people to sleep. PowerPoint is a great
tool for business, but it can also be torturous to audiences. It is a perfect
tool for outlining points of a presentation or providing relevant graphic aids.
It is also a perfect tool for distracting the audience. From fancy-shmancy transitions
to bullet point-filled pages, PowerPoint is loaded with ammunition to make your
presentations confusing, tacky or just plain overdone.
One major mistake is including
too much information and/or too many graphics. It is important to carry your brand
throughout a presentation using a consistent template design, but your presentation
should not be used as an electronic corporate brochure. Overloading it with long
text or laundry lists of benefits is exactly what not to do with a PowerPoint
presentation. Short, concise text layout and relevant graphics are as important
as the content of the presentation. Too much window dressing can swallow your
message.
Other mistakes include using
PowerPoint to lay out printed marketing materials. You may have a great presentation,
but if you are relying on it having the same impact once printed, you’ll
probably be disappointed. First of all, PowerPoint colors are based on RGB for
viewing electronically. Color printers use a CMYK color mixture, resulting in
dull colors when printing from an RGB file. Resolution is also an issue when printing
graphics from this program. Most graphics will be enlarged so much that they become
fuzzy. Normal resolution for printing any document is 300 dpi, but using images
this large in PowerPoint will result in a huge file. If you absolutely need a
hard copy of your presentation, use graphics at 150 dpi. They print clearly on
a laser printer and will result in a reasonable file size.
In reality, I know arming
the business world with design tools is like putting a kid in a candy store —
but remember — just because an effect or graphic is “neat” doesn’t
mean you have to use it.
Overall, design and business
are not all that different. In both, you should follow the universal KISS rule
— Keep It Simple, Stupid. Do that, and you’ll separate your presentations
from the 29 million bad and ugly ones.
E-mail the
author: Hillary Boulden
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