Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations (Voices That Matter)

by Garr Reynolds

Eight key lessons from sumi-e: You can express more with less. Never use more (color) when less will do. Careful use of light and dark is important for creating clarity and contrast. Use color with a clear purpose and informed intent. Clear contrast, visual suggestion, and subtlety can exist harmoniously in one composition. Omit useless details to expose the essence. In all things: balance, clarity, harmony, and simplicity. What looks easy is hard (but worth it).

Most people have a basic understanding of color, but many people lack the vocabulary for talking about color, particularly talking about what aspects work and which ones do not. Although the length of this book does not allow for a deep or technical exploration of color, understanding the basics and the difference between hue, value, and saturation are important and will help you look at the graphics around you in a different way. Learning the fundamental terms helps you work with color better and incorporate it effectively into your presentations.

Value (also referred to as luminance or tone) is independent of hue and refers to the relative light or dark character of the color. If you change a color image to black and white, you remove its hue but retain its tonal qualities. When you adjust the tint, you are adding more white to the hue, thereby making it a lighter value. When you adjust the shade, you are adding more black to the hue, making it a darker value.

Saturate the color Saturation (also called chroma) is the relative purity of the hue, or its relative brightness or dullness. Saturation refers to the depth or intensity of the hue (color). Higher-saturated hues have a richness about them and stand out well. A weaker version of a hue gets closer to neutral gray. It’s easiest to illustrate saturation by looking at examples from photography.

Simple Color Combinations Presenters can improve many visuals just by using three basic color combinations based on the color wheel: monochromatic, analogous, and complementary. A fourth combination that I like is simply using an achromatic scheme (shades of black and white only) with a single hue for emphasis.

Monochromatic schemes A monochromatic color scheme features only one color, or hue, but in various shades and tints or at different levels of saturation. This is a very effective way to achieve harmony since using the same hue gives your slides an overall unified, professional look.

When you choose hues that are next to each other on the wheel, the relationship is called analogous. Starting off with analogous colors for slide elements is a very effective yet underutilized method of choosing a color scheme and a good way to achieve harmonious combinations. If you require one or more of the colors to significantly pop out (to stress a key point in your argument, for example), you may have to adjust the value or saturation levels.

Complementary colors are basically opposites, and they sit directly across from each other on the color wheel. Because they are so different, they tend to work well together. However, complementary colors are often too strong together, so you may want to adjust tints, shades, or saturation of one or both hues to achieve a combination that is more harmonious but still offers good contrast.

white photography or illustrations along with only one hue. The hue is used for emphasis and may also serve as an element that repeats and adds unity to the slides.

Edward Tufte, in his classic book Envisioning Information, begins his chapter on color with the admonition: “Above all, do no harm.” Color used well can enhance and beautify, but color used poorly can be worse than no color at all.

Beautifully colored but unreadable information is of no use to anyone. You must take special care when coloring text to maintain sufficient luminance contrast for legibility. If text is displayed on a background that varies in lightness or color (like all too many PowerPoint templates suggest), its prominence and legibility will shift with its placement. When coloring individual words for emphasis, be sure they are still readable—and never randomly color individual words or letters unless you intend to be confusing.

When using color as labels, apply it consistently and deliberately. Remember that text and symbols in the same or similar colors will appear related, so be sure they actually are. Define what each color represents and create a color palette for your design. Important information should be indicated by location, size, and contrast, not by applying bright colors.

Feel warm and stay cool It’s useful to understand that colors can be broadly categorized in terms of their relative warmth and coolness. Colors closer to red, orange, yellow, and brown are warm, and colors closer to blue, green, and violet are cool. Warm colors tend to pop out a bit and come toward you. Cool colors tend to fade into the background. For this reason, cool colors are often used for backgrounds and warm colors are often used for foreground elements.

Slide background color: light or dark? For large keynote presentations at conferences, for darker venues (Pecha Kucha Nights or Ignite events, for example), and for larger venues, use a darker slide background since white light on the background can be blinding in an otherwise dark room. Most situations, however, such as those in college lecture halls or in school classrooms, have enough ambient light to justify a white or light background. The advantage of using a white background is that you can use stock images without having to take time to remove the white backgrounds. (PowerPoint and Keynote come with tools for removing a selected color from an image, such as a white background, but their tools do not do as smooth a job as more professional editing software.) Regardless of the type of background you choose, what matters most is maintaining clear contrast between the background and the foreground elements. It’s important to pay attention, then, to the levels of contrast among the foreground elements and the background.

shadow is added to the text on the far left to make it pop out more and add depth. Greater contast is created by placing the text in a box with a darker background.

An easy but underutilized technique is to create a unique color palette from a few colors in one of your photographs. Choose colors that you think set the appropriate tone for the visual presentation. To do this, click the color picker or eye dropper on the desired portions of the image. If, for example, you are not required to use a company template but still prefer to use a color palette that works well with the colors of the company logo or other elements of brand identity, you can easily extract the colors from the logo and add them to your presentation’s palette.

Using colors taken from the actual photograph of the salmon (plus white), I created a simple color scheme that is in harmony with other similar images used in the presentation.

few really good online resources such as ColorSchemer (www.colorschemer.com) and COLOURlovers (colourlovers.com), but my personal favorite is Kuler (http://kuler.adobe.com). Kuler is a Web-based color tool from Adobe that has thousands of community-generated color themes that you can search.

To get the theme into your slideware, write down the color values from Kuler (you’ll find the values when you click the little slider icon in Kuler) and then create those colors in your program’s color palette (entering the values into your RGB slider). You can also take a screenshot of the theme and then use your slideware’s color picker to save the colors into a new theme for your presentation, although it’s not as accurate.

It has been said that nature is the perfect colorist, so why not try making a unique color theme from a photo depicting a natural scene?

The Kuler Web site allows you to select a color and then apply harmony rules such as Analogous, Monochromatic, Triad, Complementary, Compound, and Shades that are based on some of the basic, tried-and-true principles of color theory discussed earlier.

You can spend hours playing around with Kuler. This is not wasted time if it helps you see how adjusting hue, value, and saturation creates color harmonies. For actual presentation themes, keep the number of different hues to a minimum. The mantra is to always use color for a reason and with restraint. To teach yourself more about how colors can work together, however, it’s OK to go a little wild sometimes. Kuler has a great community and it’s a wonderful online tool from which to learn.

Follow the tenets of the Zen aesthetic, including simplicity and the idea of maximum effect with minimum means. Powerful visual messages can be created with a single “color” in the form of different shades and tints. It is the value contrast that really distinguishes the foreground from the background.

You can create harmonious relationships with color combinations such as monochromatic and analogous. The way you use color helps to unify your presentations, stress important points, and balance the elements.

You can achieve an emotional connection with your audience using specific colors or focusing on a warm or cool theme. Warm colors tend to pop out a bit and come toward you; cool colors tend to fade into the background. For this reason, cool colors are often chosen ...

Great resources exist for creating harmonious color themes without requiring much knowledge of color theory. You can create themes with your own photos or videos directly in your slideware, or use ...

I tried to glean visual storytelling and reporting techniques from network news programs and documentary films. The idea of using bullet points and long lines of text never occurred to me. The slides, after all, were to be a visual augmentation of the narrative. The slides were meant to illustrate, show evidence, and evoke emotions. Instead of titles and bullet points, my instructor talked about research, evidence, structure, and story—about having a point that moves people from point A to point B. The photographic slides produced by my 35mm camera were the only visuals I was allowed to use for the assignment. Since film was expensive—and I had to wait two weeks for the slides to return from the lab—I thought carefully about the story I wanted to tell and the types of images I needed to support my argument, make my case, and tell my story. Only after I did my research and completed the plan on paper, did I set out with my camera to find evidence of the problem, taking pictures of what society had to lose (the beauty) and evidence of the threats to it (the pollution). Long before I ever heard of concepts such as the cognitive load theory or the dual channels of cognition, like most students, I knew intuitively and through experience that quality images plus narration was better than narration plus a lot of text on a screen, even though I was years away from experiencing “death by PowerPoint.”

Most live slideware presentations today still contain a lot of text. However, according to Dr. John Medina, author of the best-selling Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Pear Press, 2008), this is inefficient since our brains are not as good at identifying letters and words as identifying and remembering pictures. Says Medina, “Professionals everywhere need to know about the incredible inefficiency of text-based information and the incredible effects of images.” Dr. Medina says that all professionals should “burn their current PowerPoint presentations” and instead create slides that take advantage of our incredible ability to understand images. Each presentation case is different; however, evidence shows that we should strongly consider the use of images in the design of presentation visuals.

When we hear a story that is amplified by compelling photography, the issue becomes less of an abstraction. The issue becomes more concrete and emotional.

bleed images off the edge of the slide frame. That is, fill the entire slide area with the image. (Bleed is actually a term that comes from the printing world. In a book like this one, when you want to fill an entire page with an image, you must use an image that is just a tiny bit larger than the area of the page. In other words, you bleed the image off the page to make sure none of the underlying paper color shows through when you cut the page, which would destroy the effect.) With slides, all you need is an image that is exactly the same size as the slide. If your slides are 1024 x 768 pixels, for example, then the dimensions of the image need to be at least this large to fill the screen. A full-bleed or full-screen image gives the illusion that the slide is bigger than it is. This is especially true if part of the subject in your image runs off the screen. For example, a burger shop may make a poster with a picture of their “Enormo Burger” with part of the burger bleeding off the edge to suggest that it’s so big it can’t fit within the frame. This makes the image more compelling and it draws the viewer in.

data alone has no value. Only in the context of real life does it have meaning. And real life is conveyed best not with data but with story. To tell a story, you need the help of photos. Photos communicate on many channels. They wordlessly draw the audience into your world, make emotional connections, and prepare your listeners for what you have to say.

The bottom slide with the orange inside the apple is surprising and familiar at the same time. The simple question—not a statement—gets the audience thinking and ready for what you’ll say next.

Make one point per slide, even if you have room for more. This gives the viewer room to think and to “own” what you’re saying, which are keys to good communication.

If you’re working on a professional-level presentation, then you may want to purchase good shots or hire a photographer. In many cases, however, you will be able to use your own photographs.

Look for simplicity in your backgrounds, in your people shots, in your architectural elements, in every aspect—the simpler the surroundings, the more powerful the impact.... Look for the absence of distraction. Look for the absence of clutter and noise, watch for distracting elements that sneak into the top and sides of your frame, and create some photos that have great impact—not because of what they have, but because of what they don’t have—lots of junk. —Scott Kelby

Getting better portraits outside Direct sunlight creates really harsh shadows—it’s about the most unflattering light you can shoot someone in (only photograph people you don’t like in direct sunlight). So, how do you get around this? Have your subject step into the shade. Under a tree, under an overhang, or any place where they’re in complete shade (with

you look at photos taken by professional photographers, you’ll notice they will usually place the person on the left or right side of the photo, rather than in the center. This adds interest and energy to the photo, and focuses your attention right on the subject (try this next time you’re shooting a portrait—you’ll be amazed at what a difference this one little thing makes).

If you’re shooting in a church, or at night, or even at dawn or dusk, you’re going to get blurry photos. That’s because the shutter needs to stay open longer to let more light in, and even the tiniest little movement on your part guarantees a blurry photo. The way around this is to put your camera on a tripod, which simply holds your camera steady.

If you look at your photos, and they all look too blue, or too green, or too yellow, you’re not alone. It’s a common problem with digital cameras, but it’s so easy to fix. All you have to do is change your camera’s White Balance setting for the light you’re shooting in. For example, if you’re shooting in the shade, everything’s going to have a blue tint to it. But if you change the White Balance setting to “Shade” it changes the color so it looks great. If you’re shooting indoors, change it to the Indoor setting (usually an icon of a light bulb). Shooting in a office? To keep everybody from looking green, change the White Balance to Fluorescent. If you’re outside, you can just leave it set to Auto. Make setting the White Balance a part of your shooting routine, and your color will finally look great, no matter where you’re shooting.

company called LumiQuest (www.lumiquest.com) makes a small diffuser called a “Soft Screen” that fits over your camera’s pop-up flash, which softens and diffuses the light, and the results you get are dramatically better—your pictures will be much more flattering.

Ideally, your subject’s eyes would be in the top third of the photo, and your subject would pretty much fill the frame. Also, it’s OK to crop off the top of your subject’s head a bit (just look at the ads in any magazine), but never chop off his or her chin. Also, the most important thing to have in focus is your subject’s eyes, so make sure your focus point is on the eyes (this goes for shooting wildlife, too).

If you want much better landscape photos, the trick is to shoot your landscape in beautiful light, and that light happens twice a day: around sunrise and sunset. These are the only two times professional landscape photographers will even take landscape photos

if you want to take the quality of your images up a big notch, just turn the dial on the top of your camera to match what you’re shooting. When you do this, it changes your camera to the optimum settings for what you’re shooting, so if you’re shooting people, switch that dial on top to the little icon of a person. Simple. If you’re shooting a landscape, switch it to landscape (the icon usually looks like mountains). For shooting something really close up (like a flower), switch it to the flower icon. You’ll be surprised at what a difference this makes, yet most people never spend the two seconds it takes to make this simple change.

put your horizon line either at the top third of your photo or the bottom third. How do you know which one to use? If the sky is interesting with lots of clouds, put the horizon line at the bottom, so you see more sky. If you’ve got a boring, cloudless sky, put the horizon line at the top third, so you see more foreground instead. It’s as simple as that. Just remember; there’s a reason they call it “dead” center.

A great trick to make your photos more interesting is to simply change your angle to one that isn’t so average. Get down on one knee to shoot your children at their eye view. Shoot flowers down low—at their level, so you show a view most folks don’t see. Shoot down from a stairway on a street scene. This simple change of perspective gives a fresh, more professional look to your images.

Whenever possible, use the Insert Video/Sound option in your slideware to embed the video.

background but in a subtle way. The smoke billows slowly and dramatically in the background as the text fades in smoothly when the presenter clicks the remote. (Video from iStockphoto.com.) When the talk turns to alternative sources of energy, this video of slowly rotating windmills plays smoothly in the background as information is introduced. (Video from iStockphoto.com.)

Framing embedded video When you use a video clip that is significantly smaller than your slide, it is a good idea to frame it in some way. The example shown here is from a Pecha Kucha presentation I did in Kobe, Japan. The slides I used were 1920 x 1080 in size (16:9 aspect ratio). The video clip I wanted to show was big enough to be viewable, but too small (and at the wrong aspect ratio) to fill the large screen. I wanted to frame the video clips in an interesting way to give context. Since these were vintage TV commercials I was showing, it made sense to make the video clips appear as if they were coming from an old TV. In Photoshop I made the screen in the image of the TV mostly transparent so that anything that was behind it would show through. The video clip, then, sat behind the image file and played when I clicked the remote, giving the illusion that this video was coming out of this old TV.