We’ve all heard the phrase ‘content is king’ and I’d agree. Presentations shouldn’t be noticed - they’re there to get the content over, not to be an end in themselves. (That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be entertaining and so on, of course!)
However, one sure-fire way of getting your presentation itself noticed is to get it wrong. If your audience struggled to see the slides they were concentrating on the presentation itself, not the content, right? So why, oh why, oh why, do we still find people designing powerpoint slides like this?
The white text won’t show in light rooms and the yellow text on a green background won’t show for certain kinds of colour blindness. Heck, come to that it won’t show easily for people with ‘normal’ eyesite. Yellow and green are simply too alike for it to work once projected. To be blunt, this slide smacks of someone who thought “If I can read it, knowing what it says, at a distance of two feet, on my LCD superbright screen, I’m sure everyone will be able to read it”. Wrong.
So what will work on a green background like this? Eeerrrr…….
Well of the top of my head I can only think of black, but why have that mess in the background at all?
Oh, by the way, to add insult to injury, this was a presentationI downloaded from someone offering this as a template for people to use and emulate.
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People confuse color with contrast. They make the assumption that if they’ve added color it will stand out more than black on white. They then compound the problem by putting too much content on the slide, convinced that the audience will appreciate their efforts.
Such presentation developers fail to recognize the small, but oh so important fact, that the audience should be focused them and not the slides. A contrast must also exist between the presentation and the presenter. Rarely, based on the templates I’ve seen, does the contrast favor the presenter.
Confusing color with contrast is a nice summary. The only thing you say I disagree with is the idea that an “audience should be focussed on them and not the slides” being a *small* fact!
The RNIB have quite a comprehensive resource site.
http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/code/public_rnib003460.hcsp
Obviously they are trying to sell consultancy and other related but there are plenty of freebies and good links to other sites
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