The Art and Science of
Presentation Graphics
Creating effective on-screen presentations has one wonderful gift and one terrible curse, and they are both the same thing. When creating a presentation, you needn’t worry about color separations, line screens, dots per inch, or how a color is going to look when it is printed. If it looks good on screen, then you’ve done your job.
The curse? If it looks awful on screen, you have no opportunity to say, “It will look better when it’s printed.” Your monitor is your final output device…for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health.
Drawing and presentation software enjoy a healthy symbiosis, as each can be the supplier and each the recipient of the other’s creations. CorelDRAW and Microsoft PowerPoint, arguably the two leaders in their fields on the PC side, work particularly well together, but with all partnerships, there are rules to follow and etiquette to observe.
My Monitor or Your Projector?
Here it is the third paragraph, and I’m already contradicting myself. You know where I said “If it looks good on screen, you’ve done your job”? That’s fine and well if the presentation is going to be run on your screen. More often, though, on-screen presentations are run in front of groups using large projection devices. It might be your notebook PC driving the show, and it might look great on your display, but what counts is how it looks on the big screen, and that is often more problematic. Your notebook might support 16 million colors; does the projector? Your notebook might have an XGA display; does the projector? Your notebook might have a bright, back-lit display; how bright is the projector?
These variables will have a profound effect on the display of your slides. Your slides will look as good as the weakest link is able to render them, so your first order of business is to define that weak link. If your PC or your projector can only run at 256 colors, you should ditch the idea of creating a mosaic background of deep purple, moss green, and chocolate brown-it will all be black by the time it reaches the big screen. And red text on a black background might look incredibly rich on your bright display, but horribly dull when shone through a 400-lumen overhead.
The biggest risk of all is the situation of “Oh, just bring your presentation on disk and you can run it from our computer…” That is the leading cause of the dreadful situation played out in Figures 1 and 2. This handsome background and CorelDRAW graphic looks clean and professional on your high-color display, as you can plainly see in Figure 1 . But that rent-a-computer that they brought in for your presentation was outfitted with only standard VGA, and that didn’t do your career any good, the gory details of which show in Figure 2.
This points up the need to ask questions, lots of questions. Will this presentation be distributed from one user to the next, or will it be delivered to a room full of people? If the former, is there a minimum hardware platform that can be assumed? If the latter, can you use your own computer, and if so, what type of projector will be used?
You must either have control over your presentation environment, or know well ahead of time that you won’t have any control at all, as this one variable will have a profound effect on your creative strategy. If you cannot control your environment, then you must play it safe. You must use the simplest palette around, the 16-color VGA palette, and avoid dithering, shading, and fountaining (is that a verb? well it is now…). Set your text to Arial and Times New Roman, and don’t assume you have access to anything more distinctive.
That doesn’t mean that you have to forego any chance of creating effective and well-conceived slides; you just can’t use all of DRAW’s gee-whiz effects. Figure 3 shows a title page that gets its point across, is easy to read, won’t offend anyone, and above all, is guaranteed to look as good as it does here on virtually any computer and/or projection device. The background is pure blue and the text white and yellow. The graphic began as a four-color illustration taken from Corel’s clip art library, but before being moved into the presentation, all fills were set to black and all outlines to the same blue color as the background. It is not intended to amaze you with illustrative brilliance; it is designed to be legible and communicative, no matter the projection conditions.
So Many Options, So Little Time
Most readers of this column are designers first and presentation builders second. As a result, you might spend too much time creating graphics and not enough time creating the presentation. Therefore, I submit the following argument for your scrutiny:
The story you want to tell is more important than the illustrations you use to help tell it. Spend less time in your graphics software and more time in your presentation software.
This contradicts the old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words, and for one very good reason: You run the show completely. Presentation software gives you a unique vehicle for telling a visual story; it lets you determine exactly how and when each part of the story will appear. Your readers can’t jump 10 pages ahead, they can’t hyperlink to another part of the story, and they can’t start with the last page and work backward. You are more than just an author or a speaker; you are a director, a composer, and a choreographer.
Yet most who build presentations are content to create slides and blithely press the space bar to advance from one to the next, and that is because they haven’t taken the time to learn about the software’s transition controls, arguably the most powerful feature in any presentation program. By learning about making transitions, you are essentially creating a movie of still images. You determine which element appears when, for how long, and in what order.
Figure 4 is one of my most frequently-used slides—included in all of my seminars about color theory. It illustrates how printed inks create visible color by absorbing some parts of the spectrum of light and reflecting others. It is really quite dull but it has proven to be one of the most effective presentations I have ever delivered.
As the static image shown here, it is not capable of illustrating the complex relationship between reflected light and printed ink, and that is precisely the point. It is not the graphics that have made this slide successful. The man, the lamp, and the binder are all unadorned and unenhanced versions of plain clip art. This slide is successful because of the way that the graphics are staged. The man and his binder appear first and then the lamp appears. Then the red, green, and blue light rays emanate from the lamp, indicating the three colors of light that the lamp projects. Then the two ink colors are placed on the binder, as I report that the yellow ink absorbs the blue light, and the magenta ink absorbs the green. Finally, I show the rays of the one remaining color, the red light, bouncing off the page of the binder into the man’s eyes.
The entire thing is a bit corny. But it works because of the bite-size pieces that I spoon-feed to the audience, most of whom prove to be totally overwhelmed by the physics and formulae of color theory. Books, magazine articles, and all static media cannot do this; presentation software can. Taking advantage of this opportunity is more important than creating perfect graphics. This is not a coffee-table book with graphics that must endure for months or years; your audience will see the graphic for about 30 seconds; the lasting impression of your message is far more important.
There is a flip-side to this argument that must be made, and it involves the frivolous use of ostentatious transitions. Today’s software can attach almost any event to the transition of one slide image to the next. If you have your national anthem saved as a Wave file, you can have it play every time you press the space bar.
Please don’t!
Don’t make your transitions more conspicuous than the slides themselves, or else you send a message to your audience that you don’t really understand what is important in life. My rule of thumb: Use simple transitions when you are in the middle of making a point, and save the more elaborate transitions for when you are changing to a new topic. The more significant the topic change, the more elaborate you can make your transition without it seeming out of place. When in doubt, err on the side of less elaborate. Nothing is more distracting than a flashy transition used to signify nothing more pressing than the showing of the next slide.
Moving In
The other advantage to using simple graphics is the ease with which you can move them from your graphics software into a presentation: Issue a Paste command and you could be done. But more complex images pose a challenge. Figure 5 shows such a graphic, in which CorelnDRAW’s Transparency feature is put to work to make the light bulb melt gradually into the background. This type of effect cannot be faithfully rendered through a simple Clipboard transfer; we successfully moved it into a presentation by exporting it as a 24-bit .tif file with a transparent background.
Without the transparent background, the graphic would display in PowerPoint with a white rectangle behind it, yet using the most common file format that supports transparency, the GIF format, would result in a poor depiction of the gradient background (GIF has only an 8-bit palette, insufficient for rendering this background). I achieved success with this graphic by sending it out of my graphics program in every conceivable way, and in turn, bringing each export into PowerPoint. I didn’t even know that you could make a transparent TIFF file before then…
Moving Out
If you need to produce charts and graphs for a printed piece, consider going in the opposite direction: from your presentation software into your graphics program. You can save time by using the built-in functions to create the chart or graph, in one of probably hundreds of different designs. But PowerPoint doesn’t render the chart well enough for printing purposes, despite its claims to the contrary. So copy from there and paste into CorelDRAW, choosing a format that results in a group of editable curves instead of one big bitmap or linked object. Now you can refine the chart and bring it up to a higher standard of fidelity.
You might find a few minor imperfections—duplicate lines, pointed corners instead of rounded ones, maybe a substituted typeface—but these are easily fixed in a good drawing program. On several occasions, I have imported a chart from PowerPoint, cleaned it up, added a graphic to the background, and then sent it right back out to PowerPoint.
Don’t Choose Obnoxious Bullets
Most presentation programs give you many choices for bullets, and I rue the day that this became a competitive feature. I have seen some of the most hideous bullets in front of the most unremarkable text. When did it become acceptable for the bullet character to become more prominent than the bullet text?? Bullets signify a list, containing items that are related in some way. That’s all! They don’t deserve VIP status. Many times, I have looked at the traditional round bullet and determined that even it is too prominent, retreating to an en-dash instead.
Be Conspicuous in Your Tastefulness
Every time you resist the use of a highfalutin bullet, transition, or other effect, you score sensibility points with your audience. You tell them “I could have used a wild effect here—and you know that because you’ve seen them a million times—but I have consciously chosen not to do that.” This may only register subconsciously with them, but I promise you that it makes an impact, and ultimately a far more important one than the sensational effect.
You should expect that today’s audiences are mature, technology-wise. They have seen computer-based presentations for years now, and they are not going to ooh and ahh over some golly-gee-whiz effect. Instead, concentrate on using your software to tell a compelling and easy-to-follow story. Use your slides to dynamically illustrate a point so that your audience achieves a level of understanding impossible from a static book or a magazine. Stage your text and your graphics so that your audience feels as if it is being led by the hand in the most user-friendly way.
Presentation software offers you the chance to transcend the cold world of static computer graphics without learning a programming language or a complicated animation package. History will show that to be one of the more significant developments of the modern computer age, and the opportunity for you to experience it is here right now.