Presentation skills: Designing Presentation Slides (Coursera)

Overview

Powerpoint slides are like children: no matter how ugly they are, you’ll think they’re beautiful if they’re yours” — Scott Adams, author of the comic strip “Dilbert”. Due to this cause or another, it’s a huge stress to look at most Powerpoint slides. Depending on the “design” skills of the speaker and audience’s taste slides create different emotions from a slight annoyance to physical sickness.

But that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is that instead of improving the presentation such slides confuse the audience, distract it and finally oblige the speaker to explain them rather than being quite self-explanatory.

The goal of this course is to change that by equipping learners with a set of tools to create simple, clear, and aesthetic slides which improve the presentation of the speaker. The course covers universal design principles, templates, colors, typefaces, slides’ typography, use of photos and pictograms, composition rules, and ways to create clear and meaningful charts and diagrams.

This course is not a PowerPoint fundamentals course. You should have a basic knowledge of either Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote software.

Don’t meddle, make your slides matter.

Syllabus

Part 1: Key principles of design

This week is about the key principles of slide design. Non-designers usually can’t tell a good slide from a mediocre one. If they could we wouldn’t have had so many bad slides all around us. So this week we are going to fix this by learning the key principles of slide design.

Part 2: Templates and colors meaning

This week is about templates, colors, and fonts. What’s wrong with most templates? Which page decorations should you use to make your slide look beautiful? (None!) What information can we pass through the colors? How to choose a typeface? Does a proper typeface make all the difference? (Yes, it does).

Part 3: Typography and photographic illustrations

This module is about typography and photographic illustrations. Applying basic typography rules allows making decent-looking slides only with text. The same goes to tables. If that’s not enough there are icons — do’s and don’ts of them when you try to spruce up your text-only slides. And finally using photos and vector arts to create really gorgeous stunning slides. Basic rules on how to search them on photo banks, how to combine them with text, when icons should be used instead of photos, and vice versa.

Part 4: Diagrams and data visualization

This week is about typography and photographic illustrations. Applying basic typography rules allows making decent-looking slides only with text. The same goes for tables. If that’s not enough there are icons — do’s and don’ts of them when you try to spruce up your text-only slides. And finally using photos and vector arts to create really gorgeous stunning slides. Basic rules on how to search them on photobanks, how to combine them with text, when icons should be used instead of photos, and vice versa.

Teacher

• Alexei Kapterev