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Trash cheap clip-art and circus-like transitions!

A very common weak point is the look and feel of a slide: it strictly follows the mechanical bullet pattern, you know what I mean. Kill the bullets. Never use them. Find alternatives. Bring movement into your slide. Use graphs. Like this one:

You can easily add text next to each step. Now if you prefer to stick to the bullets, for any bad or good reason, replace them with smart symbols. Try to arrange them in a non-linear fashion. Here are alternative simple geometric forms, to be used that way:

Another platitude is the systematic use of well-known but cheap clip-art that smart managers shouldn't use anymore. Don't steal copyright material but use illustrations that are tailor-made. Surely I can give you a hand there. Read more here.

Let me come back for a minute to the 5 steps I have just mentioned. Look what you can do with just a little imagination to set up a roadmap. You can use each single flag with the corresponding action to describe it. Is this better than bullets or not?

When it comes to slide transition and animation, some people use a circus-like mix of all these amateurish moves in all possible directions. Excellent to fight clarity and get your audience fuzzy. Restrict this to the minimum. TV stations abandoned this 30 years ago. Some are beautiful, like in the last versions of PowerPoint and Keynote. Personnally, I don't use them.
 

→ My recommendation for animation?

Slide transition: none.

Slide animation: Appear.

That's it.

Now if you feel really uncomfortable with my "Kill the bullets, replace them by smart symbols"-principles, email me here and I'll give you a password to upload your slide.

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Other articles on CLARITY:

Too much eye candy may overkill some people. Sobriety in your charts pays off.

How to replace dumb lists with a set of smart shapes in minutes

How to avoid heavy slides that could end up with a 30MB presentation?

A laser-eye puts you ahead of the crowd

Create strong headlines on top of all your slides

Combine high-contrast colours to make your slide stand out

What kind of title page should you use?

Avoid long text. Why wouldn't you use light illustrations instead?

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