You ever see someone driving a really exotic sports car miss the clutch and grind the gears? It’s really funny because it completely shatters the illusion that presumably inspires one to buy an exotic sports car to begin with. No one’s impressed and they all kind of not-so-secretly assume that you’re driving way too much car.
HD screens like the one pictured above are the metaphorical exotic sports car. They represent an incredible opportunity to present insanely cool design because they allow for content to be presented in motion, but most of the time they’re just used to present static, boring designs which turn incredible technology into a really expensive series of posters. It’s like grinding the gears in your brand new Porsche.
Motion allows you to control how a message is absorbed. This is true for a number of reasons, but the most basic is because you can pace your message. You don’t have to cram every word of a presentation into one slide. In fact, if you are cramming your message into one slide, why bother to have a slide at all? No one will read it. (See the next image for an example).
Where do I even look first?
Now…it’s really easy for me to stand back and criticize. I don’t know the first thing about how these slides are designed and planned. All I know is that I’m not absorbing the content in the slides, and I was paying attention to them because I was thinking through this blog post while doing it. Unless the intended audience here is a small subset of snarky designers who pretend to be bloggers, the Bookstore (and everyone else that has invested in a lot of technology but not a lot of ideas) is spinning their wheels.
8 simple rules for better LCD presentations
Here’s some basic ideas that would improve things here. (And just in case you’re not managing a dynamic LCD sign, I suspect most of these rules are applicable to most design challenges you might encounter).
1. Learn what the technology is capable of
The internet is flooded with insanely cool ideas. Find sites that organize and present these ideas and absorb what’s possible before you sit down and do what you’ve always done. Motionographer is a great place to start for the kind of presentation I’m referring to in this post. Don’t be intimidated by the people at the top of their game, no one expects you to be as good. Be inspired by them.
You don’t need a copy of Final Cut Express and After Effects and the skills of a seasoned professional to be effective. Powerpoint (or Keynote) is a perfectly reasonable puddle in which to get your feet wet. Just remember that if you’re putting text on a plain background, you’re not even scratching the surface of what’s possible.
2. Distinguish Between Slides with Background Color
You may have noticed that all of the slides pictured in this post are “mounted” on the same blue background. There are a half a dozen other slides in the deck that I didn’t snap pictures of that are on the same color.
Changing the background color to add in some variety is a really easy win here. Use the same background color to string together sets of slides that are logically connected, but change the color when you start a new set. The background color occupies more pixels then any other color on the screen. There is no easier way to tell your audience that you’ve started to talk about something completely different then to change the background color.
3. Use good fonts
There’s nothing wrong with standard fonts. Nothing. They’re standards because they work. There’s no reason to move outside the comfort zone of solid, easy-to-read fonts, and no, Comic Sans doesn’t improve anything. Stop using it.
In the case of the slides on this screen, the designer has used Trajan Pro, which is a stunningly beautiful font for headlines and large, short segments of type, but is almost illegible in sentences or paragraphs because it has no lower case letterforms. Georgia, or Times New Roman is perfectly okay to use here, and they have the advantage of being easy to read.
Stick with basic standard fonts to start with and don’t use exotic fonts until you understand why using them makes your presentation stronger. “Eye-Catching” is less important then “legible,” in this case because the goal is get the audience to absorb the content (what’s written) not the presentation (the font you used).
4. Pace your presentation
This slide advertises the upcoming visit of a celebrity whose appeal would be (I assume) narrow but deep. In other words, a very small percentage of the people reading this slide will care about the Waterford Crystal Design Director, but the ones who do care will care a lot.
Instead of presenting all of the content in one slide like this, why not flash “Upcoming,” on it’s own slide to grab my attention, followed by a very short video clip of a beautiful piece of Waterford Crystal reflecting the light and generally looking expensive. Now my interest is piqued (and I don’t even care about Waterford Crystal).
Next we need the audience to know a key piece of information: I need to know that the design director from Waterford is coming to sign pieces of crystal and I need to know when he’ll be here. Maybe “where.” (Maybe).
Cut from the little video clip to an elegant serif type face on black. The words “Design Director, Waterford Crystal” should probably be larger then the man’s name, because in this case it’s the title that will attract the most interest. So give me a few seconds to absorb the title and his name, then tell me he’s signing waterford crystal. Next, on a totally new slide with the same basic look, tell me where and when. Everything else will distract me from the message. That’s all I need to see, and stretching it over several slides as we’ve done makes it easier for me to aborb.
5. You have too much content
Seriously. You do. Take half of it out.
6. You still have too much content
It’s still too long. If you’ve cut everything that you possibly can, rewrite what’s left to make it easier to absorb.
7. You still have too much content
Prioritize everything in the presentation and lose everything at the low end of the priority.
8. Assume Your Content Doesn’t Matter to Anyone Else.
Attention spans are fleeting. If your message can’t be read and absorbed at a glance, it’s too long and too complicated. No one’s reading it, and you’re wasting your time. If you assume from the beginning that you no one cares, so you have to go out and grab their attention and make them care, you’ll be in the right mindset to help them absorb your message.
