Edward Tufte
This spring, I took an intense course called Evaluation of Learning Systems. The majority of the assignments in this course revolved around completing a real evaluation of an online course. My group ended up writing a 29-page evaluation together. Our final assignment was to create a PowerPoint presentation to present our results to the fictional stakeholders in a short recorded video. Needless to say, we did not have much time to dedicate to aesthetics.
This semester, we were charged with redesigning an old presentation, and this one certainly deserved it. The focus was not on updating the content, but on using the design tools of color, images, and type to make improvements.
Some other important context: every group in the class was assigned a pop culture-inspired name.
In keeping with the Team Terminator theme, I went with a color palette inspired by a movie poster for Terminator 2. Blue and orange are complementary colors used frequently in movies, and they can work in a presentation like this as long as high-saturation shades are only used as accents.
Most of the presentation uses black and shades of orange, with occasional pops of blue. The stock images were selected to fit into this color scheme and the colors adjusted within PowerPoint as needed.
The data visualizations were also modified to fit the color theme while maintaining readability.
The original presentation had few images and I replaced the ones that were there. Each image was selected to correspond to Team Terminator, plastic waste, or an individual slide’s text content.
Since the images of Terminator are photorealistic, I used images in the same style and made adjustments to keep the color palette similar.
Most of the images are positioned to go beyond the frame of the slide for visual interest. Using a transparent background, the background gradient interacts with some of the images to better integrate them into the slides.
I changed the typefaces and adjusted the text layout in all of the slides. The original presentation used Arial for the headings and the body, relying on size and weight to differentiate them. Most slides were laid out the same with a full-width textbox.
Earth is the typeface used for the titles in the Terminator movie and on the posters. It is not the most readable font, so I have only used it in the headings in a large size and tried to keep the words short where possible. Even setting aside its association with the movie, it is a bold and interesting typeface.
Earth does have one quirk, which is that the letter “E” has the capital and lowercase swapped for aesthetic reasons. It does look nice in some contexts, but I’ve swapped in the lowercase “E” whenever it was at the start of a word.
Eurostile is a readable sans-serif that pairs well with Earth. It’s used in the movie credits, and I use it for all of the body text in the presentation.
Though the assignment did not require editing the content of the slides, I found myself doing it anyway because the big paragraphs were so hard to design around. PowerPoint slides aren’t meant to be a script, and ideally, the presenter is using notes and has practiced enough that they can elaborate. My group didn’t have that luxury, so the original slides acted as a teleprompter. For the redesign, I broke them up into shorter bulleted lists that summarized the content.
This was a fun challenge overall. I used PowerPoint image editing exclusively, rather than pulling them into Photoshop, which added another layer of difficulty even as it saved some time. PowerPoint may be evil, but I love fixing up cluttered presentations.
Tufte, E. (2003, September 1). PowerPoint is evil. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/2003/09/ppt2/