January 2004

Another take on “Achieving
Absence of Ugliness”

PowerPoint authors have their own unique
issues with one of our favorite mantras

It was four years ago that we first published our article with the above name. It was at first designed to be a parody of the litany of “makeover” articles that dotted the editorial landscape at the time. These makeovers usually featured a finished product that was ultra-modern, borderline over-designed, and altogether so far out-of-reach by most of our readers as to be comical. “Before you try anything like that,” we admonished, “you should first make sure that your work isn’t ugly. Once you remove ugly from the equation, then we can talk about making something beautiful.”

We did not anticipate that this would become virtually a mantra for scores of CorelDRAW and Ventura Publisher users who were working the product without the benefit of a background in the arts. But indeed, it was hard enough mastering extraordinarily difficult software without laboring under the implied expectation that all work that comes from it must be beautiful. This only perpetuated the sense among these Windows users that they were mired beneath the shadow of their Macintosh counterparts, most of whom did get schooling in the arts.

To hear about an alternate view on their predicament, in the form of a battle cry, was refreshing and relieving to many.

In the past year we have become more involved in the PowerPoint user community, leading up to the debut of our October conference. And it is clear to us that many of the same dynamics apply to those who prepare presentations for their organizations or for themselves. Knowing how to create slides in PowerPoint is not the same as understanding how to craft an effective message and how best to deliver that message. As a result, there is a stigma a mile long with poorly-designed or ill-conceived presentations.

As is the case with the Corel community, the PowerPoint users we have had the pleasure of meeting over the past 12 months are great people—eager to learn, loving of technology, exceedingly friendly, and interested in connecting with other users. It is often through no fault of their own that they find themselves on the receiving end of criticism and even the butt of jokes.

“PowerPoint’s tendency is to turn any information into a dull recitation of look-alike factoids,” writes John Schwartz in the New York Times. “ When the bullets are flying, no one is safe.”

“Death by PowerPoint,” proclaims J.R. Nicholas at the NicholasAllen website. “Who uses PowerPoint? Clever people. Brave people. It’s just that these clever, brave people end up being a little bit stupid and a little bit cowardly. PowerPoint makes them so.”

Even the New Yorker has gotten into the act.

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How did we get here? There are several factors at play that make the situation even more acute for PowerPoint users over their counterparts in the graphic software community.

It’s easy to use

Like all powerful software, there is enormous depth and complexity below the surface. But there is no denying it: PowerPoint is one of the easier programs in the general graphics umbrella to learn and begin using. With CorelDRAW, you can’t really do more than create circles, squares, or text boxes without invoking Help. Image-editing and creation software speaks a different language, and programs like Adobe Premiers and Macromedia Flash are orders of magnitude more difficult to use than PowerPoint.

This should be a good thing, but it’s not. With DRAW and PhotoPaint, or Illustrator and Photoshop, new users know they need help before they can tackle real projects. PowerPoint users don’t know that. They can begin creating slides in their first five minutes, charts and graphs five minutes later, and a fateful moment later, animations. The opportunity for disaster is far greater with PowerPoint than the other programs: a well-intentioned but brand new user can achieve ugliness with a presentation in about 15 minutes.

Everyone has it

This is not $795 software we are talking about here; it is inexpensive enough to be an impulse buy. But more to the point, so many Office users don’t actively buy Office—it comes with the computer. So there is no conscious buying decision (which would imply a level of thought and commitment) and it’s not as if you have to save up for it (financial stakes produce pride of ownership). These traditional barriers of entry are removed; just about every PC user has a copy of PowerPoint in some form or another.

It’s an extrovert

PowerPoint projects tend to see the light of day more readily than other types of creative projects. That is simply the nature of this beast: you create presentations to show other people, often as they congregate in large numbers. Granted, the same holds true for conventional graphic projects, but it’s just not the same. Work in Corel and Adobe products tends to stay private longer. There is more revision work involved, more time spent on concepts, more rounds of proofs. Then it has to be printed. PowerPoint presentations are often rolled out immediately upon their completion, whether they are ready for prime time or not.

Its reach is wider

Let’s say you open up a magazine and see a hideous advertisement. Fuchsia text, yellow accents, terrible balance of elements, the entire enchilada of ugliness. Your first reaction is probably not to condemn Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW. And it is unlikely that you would send to eternal damnation the whole notion of creating ads on the computer. But that is precisely what happens when someone has to suffer through a bad presentation. They call for a pox on the houses of all PowerPoint users and they wonder out loud why presentation software can’t just be abolished from the planet.

CorelDRAW has had to live down a reputation for amateurish work throughout the community of graphic designers; PowerPoint gets its rap from the community of man and womankind.

Can the curse become the blessing?

The irony of this situation is at once perplexing and encouraging. In many ways, the hurdles you face in PowerPoint are easier to jump than in other programs. For starters, you don’t have to worry at all about color separations, registration errors, line screens, or other advanced issues of conventional printing. You barely need to worry about the fidelity of your photographs: if they look good on screen, you’re pretty much home free. Your choice of text size is much narrower, as is typeface choice in general.

But this all calls the earlier point. PowerPoint’s entrance fee is cheap enough for anyone to get in, with or without proper credential.

Fortunately, achieving absence of ugliness is a simple prescription. If you are among the legions of presentation builders who unwittingly contribute to PowerPoint’s reputation, here is your new diet:

1. ANY COLOR, AS LONG AS IT’S BLACK OR BLUE. The background for your slides is too important to be the subject of your latest experiment with textures or the place where you decide to use that photograph you took from the Grand Canyon. Nobody ever lost a proposal because of a dark background, and nobody ever sent PowerPoint to eternal damnation because of a solid navy background, even if it is the millionth time to have been used this decade. Black or dark blue, either one would work, and if you prove that you can behave yourself with them, you can mix the two in a gradient—a single transition, not two, from top to bottom.

2. WHITE TEXT. End of discussion.

3. ONE TYPEFACE. Pick one san serif typeface for an entire project. Yes, Times New Roman looks nice on titles, but if you forbid yourself from using it, then there is no risk that you’ll use it at smaller sizes, where readability could suffer. San serif is the safer choice for on-screen work. If you pick a typeface family that has a heavy and a condensed variant, you will be able to create more than enough visual variety and deal with challenging layout issues.

4. ANIMATION IS FOR SEQUENCING. The single most important thing you can do for the sake of your own reputation and for the comfort of those around you, is change the way you think about animation. Do not think of animation as an aesthetic concern—do not use it because you think it might make your presentation prettier or more engaging. When you use animation for those reasons, it is invariably seen as gratuitous and it almost always backfires.

Make sure that your animations always carry a purpose. If you do that, you will be forgiven for any sins of overindulgence. The easist way to accomplish this is to always be mindful of any natural sequence or progression of ideas that you want to illustrate. What idea should be presented first on a slide? Which one should go second? Is the sequence important? Does it warrant risking visual distraction.

Here is a classic example of how animation can be used to show a sequence of ideas. If you limit your use of animation to that purpose, you will avoid ugliness and keep yourself out of the PowerPoint Hall of Shame.

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The point here is not to suggest that all presentations should be simple and conservative. We mean to suggest that if you are incapable of more, you should not try for more. Simple and conservative will always prevail over indulgent and gratuitous. Furthermore, your presentations will no longer contribute to the collective PowerPoint stigma and you will no longer be a candidate for induction into the PowerPoint Hall of Shame.