What not to do

Next week, I’ve been asked to give a training session of my choice to the new interpreters within our park. Whatever I want? Ha, It’s dangerous to give me that much power. Based on the fact that I am giving a presentation on the very last day of their three-weeks of training, I decided to do something fun with as much audience participation as I can.

To no one’s surprise, some of the things in life that gets me worked up are bad powerpoints, boring presentations and lazy graphic design. So my training will be entitled: “How NOT to give a Powerpoint” I figured this would be useful since the interps will be starting their new evening programs relatively soon and I need to break them of their bad habits.

So I set out to create the worst powerpoint and broke every rule that I could. I was somewhat embarrassed working on it in the office because I didn’t want my co-workers to think that this as a legitimate project I was designing.

I’ll give the presentation and have the staff take notes about what is wrong about each slide (and believe me, the list will be very long). We’ll discuss these points and then I’ll provide examples of good usage of powerpoint slides. Should be fun.





Here are some tips I've come up with:

DON'T even think about using
CLIP ART
SLIDE TRANSITIONS
SLIDE BACKGROUNDS
SOUND EFFECTS or (God forbid)
WORD ART.
These are dated and tacky and whoever designed them should be smacked upside the head. Remember, a good presentation brings the focus back to you, not itself.

RESIST THE URGE!

DON'T use your your slides as your script. Keep text to a minimum, otherwise, audience members will read ahead and stop listening to you. And then they’ll fall asleep while waiting for you to catch up.

DO use a limited number of colors. Keep the background as neutral as possible so that the emphasis is on the content.

DO use only high-quality images. Nothing blurry or pixelated. Ever.

DO attribute your sources. If the photographs aren’t yours or the NPS, you can get in big copyright trouble. Especially if the photographer is sitting in the audience.

DO use your slides to reinforce your words, not repeat them.

Try to maintain a level of graphic consistency. This means, staying with one typeface, a similar color palette, and images of the same size.

DO remember that even if technology fails, you should still be able to give your program. This is how confident you need to be in the presentation. It also helps keep your priorities: content and speech first, then supplemental images second (and know that, as a visual person, it pains me to admit that).