- 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
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Final Design Touches
To the extent that you have gone down the path of a professionally designed set of templates for yourself or a client, you should note that your decisions should affect a number of elements, some of which we've now covered, and others that just make common sense.
Now that you understand Slide Masters, you realize that they are the visual blueprints for all of your slides so that different Masters can be used for different types of presentations. According to Nancy Duarte's final checklist, every Slide (and Title) master should conform to the guidelines of the grid and anchor principles and should be checked for the correct font.
Here is a list of types of slides that are specifically designed in conformance with the overall template look:
- Title slide—walk in
- Bullet slides—with and without subtitles
- Two column
- Quote and segue
- Logo format
- Graphic treatment (custom diagrams with shapes and accents)
- Color palette (based on Color Scheme)
- Chart style
- Image, media, and/or video use
- Tables
- Grid system (design slide)
- Screenshots (for training)
But wait. For a completely branded look, you also need to pay attention to your Notes and Handout Masters. All the key elements need to be present and formatted according to your design decisions, complementing your brand or underlying your presentation template.
Before delivering a professional template, Duarte Design confirms the RGB values in the Color Schemes, makes sure they're present in the correct area of the color palette, and deletes extraneous Color Schemes from the template(s).
Duarte makes life easier for her clients by making changes to PowerPoint's default settings, including turning off "Allow Fast Saves." You should examine your own default option settings to see how well they fit your work flow.
Then of course, they test the template by running it in Slide Show mode and check all print versions for glitches. The actual presentation needs to be legible when projected, and you probably need to keep your fingers crossed if you want a given projector to faithfully reproduce your carefully designed and branded colors.
If this is a big issue for you, check the setup hints in Chapter 8, "Delivering a Killer Presentation."
Hopefully, your logo and text will be sharp, clear, and legible whenever and wherever projected.