Hello. Welcome to part one of the course on slide design.
My name is Alexei and I teach
visual communications at the Moscow University's Business School,
so I'm supposed to know something about design.
But let me tell you from the outset that I am not a professional designer.
My education is in finance and, in case you're wondering,
this is how my slides looked like before I began to study design.
This is what it was like 10 years ago.
These are the slides I was preparing for one of the conferences that I spoke at and well,
this is what it was.
In the hindsight, I should have done this because this is what I was trying to say.
But, well, I didn't.
And I thought that putting everything in italics makes the text,
of course, much more readable and relatable.
And I think I drew this one in Word,
Microsoft Word and then just inserted it as a screenshot.
So, it used to be a disaster.
But then a couple of years passed and I did
this presentation which became this enormous hit,
a million views at the moment,
just called Death by PowerPoint.
And, as you can see,
it was a radical departure from everything I did before.
Before that, it was a boring consulting job.
Now it's fun mass communications stuff,
more like advertising, less like,
I don't know, consulting.
Why are they doing it? As you can see, totally different approach.
Then lots and lots of clients, corporate clients,
boring corporate clients came to me and asked me
to design presentations for them and what I was doing
for them was a bit of a compromise between what I was doing as a freelance designer,
"designer" and what I was doing as a consultant.
I was doing slides like this.
And this is more or less what my style is at the moment.
Much less boring, much less chaotic than it was before but
probably not as punk as it was during my Death by PowerPoint years.
And at the moment,
I'm very much interested in design.
I learn from designers that I know personally,
I know quite a few of them,
and this is what I'm doing at the moment.
This is my style. This is my approach.
So if you think that you can still learn something from me,
well, this course is for you.
And if you are a professional designer,
probably you should seek some more advanced approach.
This is one of those designed for known designers course.
On the bright side, I remember what's it like to be a non-designer person.
I remember what's it like to not know what is grotesque and all this kind of stuff,
cool stuff about typefaces.
So, what we are going to study in this course dedicated to slide design are six things.
Part number one will be about key principles of design,
how I understand them.
Part number two will be about templates,
what fonts, colors, backgrounds, this kind of stuff.
Part number three will be all about typography,
about typefaces in the previous section but then about working with type.
This is very important,
every slide has some sort of text,
there are almost no slides without text and I think if you learn how to work with text,
you will be good.
I mean, this will probably be enough.
Text is cheap, pictures are expensive as you will see later on.
Part number four will be about pictorial illustrations like photos,
drawings, icons, et cetera et cetera.
Part number five will be about chart-like diagrams,
those boxes and arrows here are called diagrams,
Venn diagrams, stuff like that.
And part number six will be about data visualization,
about those bar charts and line charts and pie charts,
et cetera et cetera.
You understand what I mean. So, six things and,
well, we can begin with the key principles right away.
Before we talk about how,
let's talk about why.
What exactly are we trying to accomplish here?
And we'll have less trouble understanding how do we approach this task.
Why we need slides?
Do we need slides at all?
Personally, I just love slides.
This is a weakness of mine, if you will.
I like tinkering with slides.
This is what I do for procrastination.
There's a quote, I think,
by Jessica Hische who said that,
"The thing you should be doing while you're
procrastinating is probably the thing you should be doing for the rest of your life."
And this is probably what I should be doing for the rest of my life.
I should be just designing slides.
I just like working with them.
But, once again, if you want to show
some impressive picture to the audience, well, there you go.
If you want to show them some mind-blowing charts,
slides are great for that.
If you want some surprise in your presentation,
some space for improvisation,
this wonderful computer environment will provide you with plenty of
opportunities to improvise and to impress your audience with your improvisational skills.
But, seriously, do we need slides?
Is there an objective need for slides?
And the answer would be a definite, a resounding sometimes.
Sometimes, of course, slides could be out of context.
Sometimes, you will look much less formal,
much more relatable if you just improvise on the spot.
But most of the time,
if we talk in business setting,
if we want to talk about figures,
if we want to communicate some complex information,
we would need slides.
So why do we need slides?
Four things. Thing number one,
slides remind us what to say.
Slides remind you what to say and slides remind the audience what you've said after
the presentation ended because slides have lives of their own.
Slides travel in organizations and there's good news.
What you've said is not just in the moment,
but it has further life.
We don't learn presentations by heart anymore,
we don't just memorize stuff and I think this is great news.
I don't know about you but I hate memorizing texts.
Thing number two, if you want to impress your audience,
if you want to have this emotional impact, you need slides.
Thing number three, if you want to explain stuff to the audience,
then you draw those boxes and arrow.
And thing number four,
if you want to prove something to your audience,
if you want to provide raw data,
slides are, of course, great for that.
If the only thing that you need is a reminder,
text-based slides work great.
If you want to impress people, well,
this is not particularly impressive,
you need to have photographs.
I don't know if that's impressive enough,
this is a very long aluminum smelter in China, I've been there.
It's really huge, it's just mind-blowing how huge it is.
But if you want to explain to people how this thing works,
if a photograph doesn't do much service to you,
you have to have a chart,
like a diagram and this works as an explanation.
And if you want to provide some evidence for something,
you can have figures,
numbers on your slides.
And, of course, you don't have to memorize all this stuff,
slides do this work for you.
And also, you can distribute those files to the audience
so they don't have trouble memorizing it themselves.
They don't need to memorize it themselves.
So, remind, impress, explain and prove.
People sometimes ask me, Well, Alexei,
what about flip charts? What are they for?
And, well, let's just check.
Do they remind you what to say?
And the answer is, well, no,
they don't unless you write them beforehand.
This is just a blank slate.
Do they impress?
Not particularly, no.
Unless you know how to draw.
I mean, if you know how to draw,
well, there, go ahead.
I don't, so my drawings are not particularly impressive.
If you want to explain stuff to the audience,
well, yeah, flip charts are helpful.
If you are drawing in real-time diagrams with little humans on them,
well, yeah, it does work.
And finally, do they help to prove anything? I don't know, explain?
Maybe. Prove? No. They help you to track the discussion,
they help you to keep track of real-time conversation in a group of people and slides,
of course, are very bad for that particular purpose.
So, I often use flip charts and slides together but in and of itself,
I think the flip chart doesn't do much of a service to you as a presenter.
I'm a big fan of slides, as I have said.
So, if we ask ourselves,
"Do we need slides?"
The answer is yes.
Sometimes, in business setting,
there's no other choice.
