From the course: PowerPoint: Designing Better Slides

Creating a good design

From the course: PowerPoint: Designing Better Slides

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Creating a good design

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- [Instructor] It's easy to think that design is only about appearance, like how pretty something looks or how well it aligns with your brand, but that's not entirely true. Good design is more than just looks. At its core, design has more to do with how well something functions or serves its audience or intended users. The late Steve Jobs once said this, "Design is not what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." I love this as a quote with or without the context because as amateur designers working in PowerPoint, it's easy to get caught up in all those little tools in PowerPoint, tools like themes and templates, charts and diagrams, animations and transitions, 3D, AI, and more features, it seems, coming every day. And that's not a bad thing. They're just features, just tools, but like any tool, it takes practice and time to use these tools well and in the right context. When I first started working with woodworking tools, I didn't try to build a mansion. I started with a tiny birdhouse. Similarly, we can't expect to create professional looking presentations with just 20 minutes of exploring the PowerPoint interface, yet many of us try to, And just like designing a house, there's a lot more to designing a presentation than knowing how to use the tool. And so to create a design that works, we need to choose a design that compliments and supports the number one most important aspect of your presentation, and that is your message. So when you sit down to write your speech, you should be asking yourself these questions. Number one, what is my primary message? In other words, in one sentence, what am I saying? Number two, what is my number one goal in delivering this message? In other words, in one sentence, why am I saying this? And three, how do I best visualize this message? In other words, in one sentence, how do I represent this? And then once you have answers to all these questions, then you can begin to think about the design.

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