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A laser-eye puts you ahead of the crowd

There are many slides, poorly drawn up under the excuse of "First draft",  that look improvised and dirty like this one:

However, after a couple of seconds of thinking and concentration, you could easily figure out how to make them at least readable and pleasant to look at.

→ How can you do this?

It's a simple four-move solution:

1. First things first: align the tops, or the bottoms, or the centers, your choice. But align!

2. Next point, if you want to get the same space between items, use "distribute", horizontally or vertically.

3. Now, if you want to fine tune objects which are a bit more complex than simple rectangles --which might be an absolute must, as your eyes aren't yet too focused on the look & feel yet, use the arrow keys. Yes, the arrow keys allow you to move an object, as you know. But the move is not the one you expect. It's 1/12th of an inch or some crazy value by default. Forget this. Simply hold down the Ctrl key while nudging with an arrow key, and you'll move the object one pixel at a time. To control this, enlarge your slide to 200 or 300%. Test it now for yourself on a powerpoint slide. You see it? It's cute, isn't it?

4. Animate. Select all rectangles, go to Slideshow menu/Preset animation/Appear. You are all set. It spares you clumsy numbering.

How about doing it right the first time? 

An idea of the final result, without any cosmetics and 2 minutes of work? No miracle, but it's acceptable and won't harm your reputation:

Obviously the content here is poor. If you like to deliver professional substance, think of the framework of your slide and use graphics --I have plenty of them for you to be used Next Monday Morning-- and ANIMATE the groups of triangles and text blocks:

Nothing spectacular, but it pleases your target audience's eye. By the way, it's a real story. Read more here.

This is very easy to understand, agree? However, you have to be systematic here and train your eyes to laser-beam your slides and rack your brains to really succeed. Not easy, I can tell you. 

If you feel like improving your skills a step further and squeezing more juice out of this kind of slide, drop me aline here, with absolutely no commitment, whatsoever.

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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?

Combine high-contrast colors to make your slide stand out

Create strong headlines on top of all your slides

What kind of title page should you use?

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

Trash cheap clip-art and circus-like transitions
 

Nick Paulus © 2012. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.smilingresults.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.