|
|
Kevin Potts Profile and Articles
|
Display by:
Popularity |
Title |
1). Design Better PowerPoint
In my line of work, I find myself constantly producing PowerPoint presentations. Sometimes these are just individual slides (like a diagram or case study), sometimes they are templates, and sometimes they are whole, individual presentations. Most of my PowerPoint work is completed at my day job where I am an in-house designer, but my freelancing alter ego occasionally comes across a client needing some presentational pick-up.
2). Better Typography and More Readable Text in PowerPoint
PowerPoint is, fundamentally, a tool for communication, and the heart of that communication is written words. As many charts, videos and illustrations a presentation might have, without text these add up to little more than a collection of disjointed elements pasted between slide transitions.
Words remain the glue that ties information together. Because of this, good typography is as important -- if not more so -- than any visual element in a presenter's PowerPoint file.
3). Designing Strong Direct Mail Letters
Direct mail is one of the world's venerable advertising systems, a spin-off from the text-heavy ads that used to appear in magazines. Reduced to almost a pure science through obsessive list management and refined copywriting techniques, it remains an amazingly effective means of branding, acquisition and retention. (Look no further than Citibank, who distributes tens of billions of acquisition pieces every year.
4). Translating Company Collateral to PowerPoint
As a PowerPoint user, it is sometimes necessary to accurately translate a company's marketing collateral to slide format. Often, this information arrives in the format of a company brochure, or copied blurbs from the website, or a long Word document bogged down with New Age sales jargon and irrelevant "stuffer" copy.
It is your job to find the needles of information in the haystacks of hype, to reduce lengthy paragraphs to mere phrases, to provide your audience with only the information they need to know.
5). Brand Reinforcement in PowerPoint
The fundamental nature of PowerPoint makes it an ideal selling tool. You have a group of people, stuck in a room, listening to a speaker for an extended period of time -- anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour or more. This enclosed environment exists only for the presenters to sell something, whether it is a product, a service, or an idea.
However, many presenters, especially those with a corporate interest in mind, fail to capitalize on that environment.
|
|
|
