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Grids, The Rule of Thirds, and Rethinking Slide Presentations
Merlin Mann | Dec 31 2007
I received my contributor copy of Garr Reynolds's Presentation Zen book last week and proceeded to devour it over the weekend. A fuller review is coming to this space soon, because this is the book about presentations that's needed to be written for years, and it's just fantastic. Best of all it's not another recipe book about "how to make slides" -- this is about re-imagining how your entire presentation will work together as a persuasive and integrated show, from conception through delivery. Awesome. Anyhow, with my inaugural Macworld talk looming on the horizon (T-minus 16 days, thanks), I've been inspired by Garr's book (and the top-notch site on which it's based) to, among other things, try revamping the approach to how slides fit in to my overall show. As I said on the Twitter, that starts with shit-canning the PowerPoint-y Keynote templates I've previously torn up and pasted together for stuff like Inbox Zero (here's the slides for that one, which Garr was kind enough to feature in his book). But, now, rather than strictly trying to reinvent the wheel, I have a quest. A quest for a crazy-simple, design-centric Keynote template that's more about composition than gradients and 3-D bullet points. Ever heard of The Rule of Thirds? Yeah, you probably have. Like the wikipedia article says:
Here's a good example off that wikip page. (image by Moondigger [CC-By-SA-2.5]) And the one-third grid works. So much so that in apps like iPhoto '08, the The Rule of Thirds (and the related Golden Ratio) have come up on Garr's site before, and on page 151 of his book, he talks about how a grid like this can provide a level of light constraint that makes your layout easier and more harmonious:
And, how. So, I want this for Keynote. I've begun lightly noodling with a new set of Masters that's built around a Rule of Thirds grid (trashing the whole Center MacCentercenter approach), but before I get ahead of myself, I figure why not cast my line towards the more gifted waters of the LazyWeb first... The Question to YouHave you tried using grids like the Rule of Thirds in your own slide decks? Got a favorite layout or inspiring grid structure that works well for a slide’s aspect ratio? Got great advice on getting out of the stock slide template look? Links to graphical examples welcomed. Winning high-five goes to folks who are willing to share the actual Keynote template they've used. 20 Comments
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One idea per slideSubmitted by Aisyah on January 2, 2008 - 9:35am.
This is my 2 cents. I can understand swilcox's predicaments when it comes to designing slides for complex technical presentations. I teach aromatic chemistry to undergrads, and I find that one of the Presentation Zen techniques, i.e. one idea per slide, works quite well. Yes, it'll take a lot of your time to think through the whole thing and to arrive at the essence of a complex technical data. The great thing is that it is highly satisfying to see your thoughts crystallising in front of you (as slides). Most of the time I would express these simple thoughts in the forms of images. So one image per slide labelled with 1-2 short sentences. They serve as prompters for me, instead of rows and rows of bulleted technical data. My students are more attentive than ever since they've got to listen to me more than simply copy words off the screen. I do bring in my notebook (where I did most of my scribbles during the design of presentations) - just in case. However, the last thing I'd to do for my lectures is memorising my speech. » POSTED IN:
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