Wednesday, July 07, 2004
It's Time for Fox Conferences to Change Their Designs
Today's beyond bullets again has some good advice for improving your PowerPoint presentations. One suggestion Cliff makes is that conference organizers should not require speakers to adhere to strict template guidelines. This is good advice. For as long as I can remember, Fox conferences have used the blue background, yellow lettering and prominant conference logo design. Cliff has explained why this layout is bad in past blogs. It's time for some change...and change that is for the better. Here's why...
At last month's DevEssentials conference, we had the same, overused templates. The logo was large and placed in the upper-left hand corner of the slide. Because of the size of the logo, the slide title was pushed down, making the top 1/3 of the slide unusable. One of the rules of speaking is to not use the bottom 1/3 of the slide so that people in the back can see everything. That left about 1/3 of the slide as usable space. Also, English speakers read from left to right. The top-left corner of the slide is where you should put the most important stuff. I doubt the fact we were at DevEssentials was the most important thing (no offense, Russ), but the content being delivered by the speaker should be most important.
Cliff's blog today has inspired me to talk to the organizers of Southwest Fox and discuss the PowerPoint templates they want to use. Hopefully, some change, for the good, will happen.
At last month's DevEssentials conference, we had the same, overused templates. The logo was large and placed in the upper-left hand corner of the slide. Because of the size of the logo, the slide title was pushed down, making the top 1/3 of the slide unusable. One of the rules of speaking is to not use the bottom 1/3 of the slide so that people in the back can see everything. That left about 1/3 of the slide as usable space. Also, English speakers read from left to right. The top-left corner of the slide is where you should put the most important stuff. I doubt the fact we were at DevEssentials was the most important thing (no offense, Russ), but the content being delivered by the speaker should be most important.
Cliff's blog today has inspired me to talk to the organizers of Southwest Fox and discuss the PowerPoint templates they want to use. Hopefully, some change, for the good, will happen.
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