Ashley’s Weblog

After a presentation in class given by Dean Shareski about presentation design, we were asked to critique a presentation from SlideShare . Our critique is to be based on the rules and guidelines that Dean provivded us with in class. These rule and guidelines were presented in the form of a youtube video titled PowerPoint Extreme Makeover.

This video discussed the do’s and don’ts of creating a PowerPoint presentation. As I was watching, I felt a little embarrassed knowing that I make all of the mistakes that Dean discussed. I started to feel really sorry for the people who have had to watch a PowerPoint presentation created by me. I understand that many others have made these same mistakes, but while watching, I knew I need to the change the way I make presentations in the future.

Some of the don’ts are as follows: try to stay away from templates, do not overuse bullets, do not have information overload on each slide, do not overdo transitions, do not use clip art, and refrain from animations. There are others that I’m sure I have missed, but those are the ones that have stuck out in my mind.

I found a presentation on SlideShare that does not have good design formatting. It is titled Communication Skills. This presentation doesn’t do a good job highlighting key points. There is too much information on most of the slides and the writing is quite small. The highlighted text boxes do not change, therefore I think it is hard to tell which information is the most important. Bullets are overused and it again makes it difficult to see what is important. There are a few slides that are good such as #29 because it gives an acronym and is simply stated focusing on one idea.

Some do’s for a PowerPoint presentation are as follows: stick to one idea per slide, use real meaningful pictures, set a high contrast between background and text, set the screen black to the audience focuses on you and highlight text in a text box to emphasize something.

This second presentation I found titled Designing Effective “PowerPoint Presentations” shows the difference between a lot of the do’s and don’ts listed above. I was supposed to try and find a presentation that used good design principles and I was unable to, so I decided to post this slide show. It is really interested to actually see how a presentation can be improved by changing simple aspects of each slide. I encourage you all to watch this presentation because you can learn a lot from it!