PowerPoint Design Tips
Print
EmailShort All Things Teaching video on tips for creating slides which align to what we know about multimedia learning theory.
Video Transcript
Powerpoint has lots of great templates and so does MSU Extension and the OD website. The Extension templates take into account the broader MSU brand standards and graphics, which also have their own website. If you're using the MSU Extension templates, the first thing to think about is matching the colors. Consider using the MSU color palette for your design elements. The paintbrush tool can be used to grab the font styles and keep them consistent. Try and keep your font to 30 or above and be consistent in your use of fonts. And if you need the fonts to be smaller then consider if you have too many words on one slide. The color picker can also be useful for picking up matching colors for things like tables or other graphics like this. Fonts and shapes can also be used as design elements. So for example, compare this slide, which is fine with this one, which looks a little bit more polished. I just use shadows for the text and a line with the shadow. Pay attention to how you're using space, especially with photos. A slide like this has a lot of white space and it doesn't look very good. Compare it to this one where it's one simple picture, but it's really filling the page and the text is larger and it's just balancing out the space better. You can also use the color picker to pick up colors from within your photo in order to use them in the background, or for the font or for other design elements like this. In this situation, I pick the color and then I go back into the color and "More Colors" and I adjust the slider to get a lighter tint of the color that looks better with the font and the purple. Sometimes you'll want to use an image in the background. To do this, you have to change the transparency of the image so that you have enough contrast. So you go into the properties and you change the transparency here. Remember that fewer words are better on PowerPoint slides. Keep each slide to one main point if you can. If you have a list like this with bullets and sub-bullets, think about breaking them up so that each main bullet has its own slide. You can also change bullets into graphics. If you have a few bulleted items, create the bulleted list and highlight it. Then go on to Convert to Smart Art. So I'm going to go into "More SmartArt" graphics here and find the one that I want. Then you can go in and adjust the color palette. You can really see how the format painter or that paintbrush really speeds up the process. In this example, I'm going to also add some icons. To summarize, be consistent in your font use and make fonts big enough. You can use fonts as simple shapes as design elements, and you don't want to have too many words on slides. Use the color picker and the eye dropper to reuse colors from the MSU brand color palette, or to pick up colors from your photos. And then use the Format Painter to quickly apply formatting. Use fewer large photos that fill up the space that will look better than a lot of little ones. And don't create sides with a ton of bullets and sub-bullets. Add more slides if you need to. And use Smart Art to turn bulleted lists into something more appealing. And of course, always make use of available templates.