The Artful Presenter

Jesus (one of the Coursesites designers at Blackboard) and I had some creative freedom with this slide deck, so we ran with it. I hope you like the steampunk-ish imagery and typography. I’m glad that I work on a team that allows its designers to take some risks. Enjoy!

Want your slides to have more of an impact instantly? Stay away from the standard, run of the mill fonts that Microsoft tries to force on you: Arial, Times New Roman, Calibri, etc. These fonts are boring and don’t do anything to enhance your message. Let’s look at an example: 

The slide is okay, but the font used, Times New Roman, is pretty bland and doesn’t really do anything to truly enhance the presentation. Now look at the next slide:

Slight tweaks to the color and fonts help highlight and bring a visual focus to the slide. 

The simple tip is this: stay away from Microsoft’s default fonts. They’re tired and we’ve all seen them way too often.  

If you’re interested in typography and cool fonts check out FontFeed! 

If you have to put text on a slide, for God’s sake, make it interesting. Play with colors, the size of text or the justification.

Typography is art, so look at some examples and play around with the text.  Here’s a slide from a deck that I’m creating for our sales team. 

I know it’s not the most exciting example of typography, but these small tweaks to your text help keep your deck interesting.