Designing Your Visual Aids

1
Designing Your Visual Aids

• Dr. W. David Jones
• South University
• [phone]
• dajones_at_southuniversity.edu

2
Outline

• Select your equipment
• Compose your message titles
• Choose your chart design
• Ensure consistency
• Strive for simplicity and readability

3
Outline

• Select your equipment
• Compose your message titles
• Choose your chart design
• Ensure consistency
• Strive for simplicity and readability

4
Analyze your constraints and resources

• Audience/presenter constraints
• Audience expectations
• Audience size
• Familiarity
• Availability constraints
• High-tech options
• Low-tech options
• Room size/Furniture
• Lighting
• Color capability and quality

5
Outline

• Select your equipment
• Compose your message titles
• Choose your chart design
• Ensure consistency
• Strive for simplicity and readability

6
Choose message titles

• Focus on key ideas and supporting points
• Preview
• Recommendations, conclusions, objectives
• Supporting messages
• Avoid topic titles
• Use message titles

7
Avoid topic titles
8
Message titles offer many benefits

• Improve audience comprehension
• Save process time
• Increase your visuals stand-alone sense
• Help you with transitions
• Improve handouts

9
Message Title
10
Outline

• Select your equipment
• Compose your message titles
• Choose your chart design
• Ensure consistency
• Strive for simplicity and readability

11
Choose your chart design

• Data-driven charts show how much
• Pie chart show
• Percentages
• Shares
• Proportions

12
Choose your chart design

• Data-driven charts show how much
• Bar charts show
• Rank
• More or less than
• Difference among

13
Choose your chart design

• Data-driven charts show how much
• Line charts show
• Increase/decrease
• Fluctuations
• Trends

14
Choose your chart design

• Concept charts show how

• Adopt a strategic approach
• Analyze the audience
• Identify your intent
• Make your message memorable

With words
With concept chart
15
Choose your chart design

• Text visuals show what or why
• Avoid centering

Four score and seven years ago our fathers
brought forth on this continent a new nation
conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal.

• Use indentation effectively
• Dkljah
• Lkjdfh
• Jhlkjhf
• lkjhdflkj

16
Outline

• Select your equipment
• Compose your message titles
• Choose your chart design
• Ensure consistency
• Strive for simplicity and readability

17
Ensure consistency

• Create a master template
• Design a single pattern
• Chose a consistent build device
• Consider team consistency
• Select a consistent page set up
• Follow corporate identity standards

18
Ensure consistency

• Ensure structural and transitional consistency
• Preview and support slides
• Show a preview or agenda
• Use the same wording
• Transition devices
• Repeated preview slide
• Trackers

Ensure consistency
19
Ensure consistency

• Use parallelism for consistency
• Use grammatical parallelism
• Use concept parallelism

20
Outline

• Select your equipment
• Compose your message titles
• Choose your chart design
• Ensure consistency
• Strive for simplicity and readability

21
Simplicity

• Overall simplicity
• Dont create too many visual aids
• Dont overload your visuals
• Dont bombard the audience with auditory, visual
  or animated clutter
• Plan to get rid of already used visuals

22
Simplicity

• Simplicity in your data-driven charts
• Eliminate chartjunk
• Override computer-default chartjunk
• Keep data points to a minimum
• Simplicity in your concept charts
• Simplicity in your text visuals
• Use the six by six guideline
• Keep lines short
• Break the six by six guideline, if necessary

23
Simplicity

• Readability
• Choose a readable font
• Use a readable font size
• Avoid letterjunk
• Avoid all caps

24
Simplicity

• Color issues
• Keep color simple
• Use color for a reason
• Choose visible background/test color combinations
• Think about audience interpretations
• Cultural black v. white for funerals
• Business in the red
• Company IBM blue

25
Finance Area Definitions

• FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS Help the
  financial system operate efficiently and transfer
  funds from savers to investors
• FINANCIAL MARKETS Physical
  locations or electronic forums that facilitate
  the flow of funds

Example to avoid
26
PowerPoint Presentations

• Some Things to Consider

With Emphasis on Things to Avoid!
R. L. Erion South Dakota State University
27
PowerPoint provides a tremendous variety of
special effects.
Of course, all that power is easily abused.
28
Areas to Be Covered
Really irritating effects
Ways to Make Text Hard to Read
Now That Youve Prepared the Presentation, What
Else Can You Do to Make it Unbearable?
29
Really Irritating Effects

• Sound Effects
• Cool Noises as Each Slide Changes
• (avoid by selecting no sound )

30
Really Irritating Effects

• Noises as Animated Text Comes In
• May be best to avoid sound with

Typewriter
and Laser Text.
They are particularly bad when the text is
relatively long.
31
Really Irritating Effects

• Visual Effects
• Drop In is quite annoying with relatively long
  text segments.

Crawling under Custom Animation can be
excruciating.
Has Andy Rooney discovered Custom Animation?
There is a lot of material in here.
32
Incidentally...

• One can easily get away from the usual
  backgrounds supplied with PowerPoint.
• You can make your own design templates by
  selecting Slide Master under View.

Save the results as a Presentation Template in
the Presentation Designs folder in Templates
33
One wouldnt want to leave out video that is too
small and poorly conceived...
And ends up leaving you in the dark!
34
Ways to Make Text Hard to Read

• Poor Choice of Font
• Mismatch with Background
• Failure to Plan for Lighting
• Too Small

35
Poor Choice of Font

• PowerPoint offers the opportunity to use

WordArt. Not always a wise choice.
There are also a lot of fonts to choose from such
as Pristina, Rockwell, Tohoma Small Cap,
Spinstee, and Lynx. Many are hard to read.
Arent you glad that text can come in word by
word with Custom Animation?

36
Other Ways to Make TextDifficult to Read
The Font... choice under Format provides
several ways to make text harder to read.
Italics, embossing, and outlining can all cause
some trouble.
One can play with colors here as well, which
brings us to...
37
Mismatch with Background

• The choice of colors can make a big difference.
• Backgrounds which have both light and dark areas
  can be particularly troublesome.

38
Failure to Plan for Lighting
39
Size of Text

• Generally recommended that the text go no smaller
  than 18.
• Making things smaller can create problems for
  some people.

40
Now That Youve Prepared the Presentation, What
Else Can You Do to Make it Unbearable?

• Even if you have failed to use any really
  annoying things from PowerPoint, you can still
  make the presentation an unpleasant experience.

41
PowerPoint has given us something even worse than
doing a presentation by reading a paper.

• Reading the slides to people can be annoying.
  People will be unhappy if you have to read the
  slides (because the text is too small or the
  projector too dim).
• People will be really annoyed if the slides are
  wonderfully legible and you read to them anyway.

Of course, you could read each slide at least
twice...
42
Gettysburg Cemetery Dedication
(Medium Green)

• Abraham Lincoln

(Orange)
(Dark Green)
(Carolina Blue)
43
Agenda

• Met on battlefield (great)
• Dedicate portion of field - fitting!
• Unfinished work (great tasks)

44
Not on Agenda!

• Dedicate
• Consecrate
• Hallow(in narrow sense)
• Add or detract
• Note or remember what we say

45
Review of Key Objectives Critical Success
Factors

• What makes nation unique
• Conceived in Liberty
• Men are equal
• Shared vision
• New birth of freedom
• Govt of/for/by the people

46
Organizational Overview
47
Summary

• New nation
• Civil war
• Dedicate field
• Dedicated to unfinished work
• New birth of freedom
• Government not perish