©2009 Prepared Graphics

Presentation Case Study: Help with HazMat!

A client in the airline industry came to me needing some help designing his hazardous materials course. This guy is an expert in his subject matter and has a great presence coaching his trainees. He's pretty good formatting in PowerPoint but this time he had some graphics and builds that needed more of a treatment than his usual text-bulleting skills could handle.

He also didn't want to pour a lot of money into fancy illustrations, he just wanted everything to look like it belonged together. Here's what I did for him:

We talked about his preferences in design and how the presentation would flow. For example, he had very specific ideas about how to "test" his trainees but was open to using some simple graphics to make it clear. Here's how it worked out:

Simple title slide but I treated the text as a design. Everything on this page was done in Keynote, but the final presentation was exported to PDF and PowerPoint.

Do you know how to determine the ideal font size for your audience? Do you know why you shouldn't use a white background? How many slides is too many? How much text is too much?

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These bullets could have easily been formatted in PowerPoint by my client, but I took an extra step in highlighting some key words and developed a color/style theme.

Callouts like this can be done in Keynote and PowerPoint, but I added extra value with the book art.

Here's where the build begins. I created some boxes in a nice "Web 2.0" style to give it a little kick. Little design aspects like this can make a big difference. An audience is judging your design and they are forming an opinion of your level of expertise, whether or not you believe it.

A few minutes in Photoshop and the photos look like part of the whole package. You can paste your own photos into PowerPoint for free, but does it make you look like a pro?

These types of treatments are made to enhance your content by making it legible and easy to understand. Anything more is fluff (and nonsense), and anything less lowers your audience's estimation of your credibility.

First, I took a look at his text. He had everything organized by slide and knew exactly what he wanted (for brevity's sake we'll look at just a few). He also sent me some photos that would have to be integrated with the slides.