Assignment 11

Confirming pages

78 Unit One Building Blocks for Effective Messages

Use ragged right margins when you

• Do not have proportional typefaces. • Want a less formal look. • Want to be able to revise an individual page without reprinting the whole document. • Use very short line lengths.

How should I design presentation slides? LO 5-2 ▶ Keep slides simple, relevant, and interesting.

As you design slides for PowerPoint and other presentation programs, keep these guide- lines in mind.

• Use a big font: 44- or 50-point for titles, 32-point for subheads, and 28-point for examples. • Use bullet-point phrases rather than complete sentences. • Use clear, concise language. • Make only three to five points on each slide. If you have more, consider using two slides. • Customize your slides with the company logo, charts, and scanned-in photos and

drawings.

Use clip art only if the art is really appropriate to your points and only if you are able to find nonsexist and nonracist images. (At the end of the 1990s, as Marilyn Dyrud has shown, the clip art in major software programs was biased. 4 ) Today, Internet sources offer many more choices.

Choose a consistent template, or background design, for the entire presentation. Make sure the template is appropriate for your subject matter. For example, use a globe only if your topic is international business and palm trees only if you’re talking about tropical vacations. One problem with PowerPoint is that the basic templates may seem repetitive to people who see lots of presentations made with the program. For a very important presen- tation, you may want to consider customizing the basic template.

Choose a light background if the lights will be off during the presentation and a dark background if the lights will be on. Slides will be easier to read if you use high contrast between the words and background. See Figure 5.5 for examples of effective and ineffec- tive color combinations.

Multi-touch screens, which let people use finger gestures to access features from their smartphone and tablet PC displays, may soon be common in their larger cousins. Microsoft’s purchase of Perceptive Pixel, which is a pioneer in the technology for desktop PCs, coincides with enhancements planned for Windows 8 for use with multi-touch screens. The change in how users interface with computers may significantly affect how users plan and use presentation software, such as PowerPoint.

Source: Clint Boulton, “Microsoft Bringing Multi-Touch Screens to the Big Time,” The Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2012, http://blogs.wsj. com/cio/2012/07/11/microsoft- bringing-multi-touch-screens-to- the-big-time/?KEYWORDS=power point+presentation .

Figure 5.5 Effective and Ineffective Colors for Presentation Slides

Effective

Ineffective

Site to See

Go to http://pptideas.blogspot. com/2012/04/presentation- tipcase-studysuccess.html for Dave Paradi’s tips and links on using PowerPoint slides in presentations.

Site to See

Go to www.mouseprint.org for examples of mouseprint, or legalese in a font so small that only a mouse can read it.

Go to

Go to

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