Slide Improvement - Part 1 of 5

During the course of next few days, I am going to share five slides with you. Five slides I have come across in real life. We are going to evaluate the slide and see how it can be improved. It is like the "Before and After" of PowerPoint slides.


Slide Improvement 1
Here is a slide which came to me from a major agency in India. In this slide they are talking about their presence across India. This slide is meant to impress the client about how big the organisation really is.

This is a slide I received a few days back and this is the inspiration behind the five part series on slide improvement. This slide is bad. What is meant to impress actually does the exact opposite.


There are various ways of improving such a slide. One that I am showing below took me under two minutes to modify.

What I have done is to enlarge the map, put the city names along with the red dots. Hence the lines have been eliminated. I have also removed the rectangle which contained the text and let the text merge in the white background. This is easier on the eye and makes it look classier.


Of all the possible solutions, here is one more.

This slide brings the map into limelight (the sole objective of the slide was to talk about national footprint). After having seen the map, people can read the text. I have removed the grey area outside the map and now it merges well with the white slide background. I have used the same map which was there in the original PPT. If we use a better looking map, the slide will look even better.


Lessons:
1. If we are using maps, the larger the map, the better it looks.
2. Label the map well. Label the cities where they are.
3. Only the map should be in the limelight. Make other things merge with the background. Example, how the text in the chocolate rectangle was standing out and drawing our attention away from the map in the original slide.