Datasheet

Truth and sincerity
More than anything else, audiences want sincerity and truth. Just because
you put that sentence in a 48-point bold font in a contrasting color doesn’t
mean that your audience will believe what it says. If there’s something in
common among audiences of any place, age, and sex, it’s that they want
something they can believe — and if there’s even a hint that something men-
tioned in your presentation is gobbledygook, you can wave goodbye to the
remaining 999 slides in that presentation! (And please don’t make such long
presentations.)
Of course, there are rare exceptions to that rule. A few centuries ago, audi-
ences didn’t believe that the earth was round — or that people could find a
way to fly. If what you’re presenting is similarly groundbreaking, I’ll let you
put that in your next PowerPoint presentation. And I’m so proud that you are
reading this book.
Never use any content that can be thought of as discriminatory toward race,
gender, age, religious beliefs, weight, and so on. Not only will discriminatory
phrases or even images reflect badly on you, they’ll also hijack the entire
focus of your presentation.
Style and design
To enliven your message, use as many of these style and design guidelines as
you can balance on a single PowerPoint slide:
⻬ Choose an uncluttered background for your presentation.
• Plain color backgrounds get around that clutter problem just by
being plain!
• Other background types, such as textures, gradients, and pho-
tographs, have to be more carefully chosen.
Test your background choice by inserting enough placeholder text in an
18-point font size to fill the entire slide area in two slides. Use black text
on one slide and white text on the other. If you can read text on both the
slides clearly, your background really works! If just one color works, you
can use that background if you make sure that you use the right colors
for all other slide objects. See Chapter 3 to find out more about picking
the right colors.
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