Hi again. In this lesson, we're going to talk about three ideas for designing your slides. When I use PowerPoint, I try to make my visual aids look as little like PowerPoint as possible. And the quickest way for people to identify that you're using PowerPoint is to use one of PowerPoints, pre configured templates, or even your own corporate template. Yeah, I know the marketing people are gonna go batty if you don't have the corporate logo on every single slide, but personally, I question what value that logo is adding to your message. The same can be said for all the fancy swirls and color variations you find in any of the PowerPoint templates.

Some of you may disagree with me, which is entirely your own prerogative, but in this lesson, we're going to gear it around an alternative approach. Let's get started. When I start a PowerPoint, I always start by selecting a blank presentation, which just gives me a white canvas to work with the first decision you need. To make is whether the dimensions of the canvas suit your presentation needs. Now barely anyone recognizes that there's a choice or why it even matters. As you can see from my screen here, my canvas has kind of a long rectangular shape, which is the widescreen view.

The other alternative, which is the standard view can be viewed by going to your design menu and clicking on the slide size tile. Now let's talk about when you use each of these settings. The standard size should be used if you're making a presentation on a projector screen. The four by three size will nicely fill up the entire screen and avoid any extra whitespace at the top or the bottom. On the other hand, the widescreen is useful if you plan to screencast your presentation and create a video Why? Because all video hosting sites are configured to the 16 by nine screens.

Sighs check out most screencasts of PowerPoint presentations on YouTube. And you'll immediately notice the black birch, a dead giveaway that it's a PowerPoint presentation. Now in this particular presentation, you'll see that I'm getting a little bit creative. I'm using the standard four by three slide size, but I move my slides over to the right of the video screen, which creates a little extra space where I can put my webcam and some other notes that I want to share with you as we go along. This is done using screencasting software, not PowerPoint. you'll decide for yourself what screen size is right for your presentation.

My point is to think about it because few people do. The other thing we can do in the design menu is to change the background color of the slide. Perhaps you don't like working on a white canvas as a background and you want to use say black. Clicking on this will bring up a little format pane on the right of your screen. And we can now select Black which applies this new background to this slide. If we want to apply a black background to all of our slides, we can click this little button at the bottom.

Now to add a new slide, you can either right click on the thumbs pane of the left of your screen, or you can go to the Home Menu, or you can go to the Insert menu. Lo and behold, any new slide that we add will contain our new black background. But we have a problem when we go to add a title to our first slide, the font is black, and obviously that doesn't make it very visible. One fix would be to highlight the text or click the edges of the text box and using our font color tile, change it to something visible, say white. This could be a bit of a pain though to do over and over and over throughout the entire course or presentation. So instead of changing the font color from Every single textbox we could change the font color for the entire presentation by changing the slide master.

Now to access the Slide Master, we go to the View menu and select Slide Master. This opens up one of our secret menus happily entitled Slide Master. Now for any formatting changes you make here will be applied to the default settings for all of our slides. Let's just select all the text boxes that are on the top master slide. So that updates all the templates beneath it. Now go back to your home menu and click on the white font.

And while we're at it, let's say we want to use it a nice thick font as well. So let's select Arial Black. Now, you can use that master slide to add other things to the default layouts as well. Say your marketing people insist that every slide must have the corporate logo. Let's add a logo, and it will show on every one of your slides instantaneously in the exact same location. Go back to our slide master menu on the ribbon and click on the big red X to close the Master View, which returns us to our presentation.

Now, let's add more slides to our presentation. PowerPoint has a bunch of pre configured layouts which are self explanatory on their own and give you a starting place. The title layout and the title and content layout are probably the most common. However, the layout that I most often use is the blank layout. And the reason is because once again, I don't want my presentation to look like a PowerPoint template. And the blank layout means I create every textbox and object on the slide from scratch as we We'll begin learning about in the next lesson.

But before we go there, let me pose one more very important question. And that is, how many slides should your presentation contain? Professional opinions on this question will vary widely. Some people will say fewer or better, you may come across the 10 2030 rule for presentations, which says that you should have no more than 10 slides for a 20 minute presentation with no smaller than a 30 font size. Okay, that's one viewpoint. If I were to ask you how many slides I use to create our introductory video, what would be your guess?

There was a title slide, there were some global stats. There was the annoying attributes. There was a slide on death by PowerPoint. There was a slide for the multimedia principle. There was a slide with a bunch of people. There was an executive preview and finally one more slide on the growth in the use of PowerPoint.

That's eight There are two more that you probably didn't even notice that I use for the world stats to bring the total to 10 slides for just a four minute presentation. Whoops, did I just break the cardinal rule? I'll allow you to judge for yourself whether or not I attempted to cram too much information into that opening presentation. But here's how I think about what dictates the number of slides I have in my presentations. Principle number one is that there's no prescribed number of slides when you are creating visual aids for a presentation. Principle number two is that there should be no more than one idea per slide.

And ideally, ideas shouldn't spill over multiple slides. Principle number three is that the script guides this decision more so than anything else. Remember the script that we talked about in that first lesson? Yeah, I know half of you ignore me because you are gifted presenters already are rationalized. Who has time for that. Well, here's what you do.

With that script, let's open up the speaker notes part of our canvas. If it's not open on your screen, you can use your mouse and pull the lower margin under the editable slide upward to reveal this section. Now copy and paste the first message of your script into the speaker notes section of the PowerPoint. As you're doing this, imagine what your visual aid would be to help support the message. It might be a picture, it might be some text, it might be a graph, some slides might have several paragraphs associated with them. Other slides might just have a few words.

The point is to think about what visual aid would enhance your message, which is not the same thing as encapsulating your script and bullet points. Remember the multimedia principle which says that our message is more effective when we engage the whole of our brain using both words and other imagery when you use this approach. You will typically find that you have all sorts of other ideas that you can use for visual cues. And this has a tendency to result in more slides, not fewer. For the audience, there'll be more engaged because as they listen to you, they will see some sort of pictorial, graphical, conceptual visualization of your ideas as you're speaking. In our next section of lessons.

I'm going to discuss all sorts of ideas to get you thinking and using PowerPoint more along these lines. In this lesson, we covered all three really important points about slide design. First of all, we talked about how you make the decision about setting the dimensions of your screen that is, when do you use a widescreen and when do you use a standard screen. We then set up our blank canvas using the slide backgrounds and the slide master. And finally, we talked about how we determine the number of slides in our presentation by curving up scripts and allocating them to different slides as they make sense. See you again in our next lesson.