- What Designers Think About
- Using the PowerPoint Design Templates
- Creating a Branded Template
- Fine-Tuning Color Schemes
- Saving Your Design Templates
- Understanding the Role of Masters
- Final Design Touches
- Losing the Extraneous Placeholders
- What About Fonts?
- Designing for Handouts
- Using Third-Party Design Tools
- Dramatic 3D Animated Designs with OfficeFX
- Looking Ahead: PowerPoint 2007
- Case Study: Creating Design Templates for a Travel Agency
- Summary
- Resources
Summary
Because such a great part of a successful presentation is its visual effectiveness, in this chapter we picked the brains of some design experts and applied their concepts in PowerPoint and some related programs.
Not everyone has a professional eye, and that's why we analyzed the concepts of using space and branding and created a different template for different corporate divisions and objectives.
Colors are a key component in any design, and we need to understand the various parts of the Slide Design Task Pane, including Design Templates and Color Schemes, and how they interrelate to design properly. We also saw how multiple Masters could help us differentiate parts of our presentation and reformat sections automatically.
The main elements of creating an effective design include
- Thinking like a designer
- Implementing a brand strategy
- Using Color Schemes to fine-tune color choices
- Saving designs as Design Template files
- Choosing simple and effective fonts
We also covered the essential aspects of designing for Handouts and mentioned some third-party design tools. We noted that many design changes will be on the horizon in the next version of PowerPoint and provided a brief preview of some of them.
Now it's time to move from the overall look of the presentation to the individual message components and begin the really worthwhile task of creating individual slides and concepts that visually communicate our most important ideas.