Professional Design for Posters
Everyone has suffered through a horrible presentation. There’s a reason that people talk about “death by PowerPoint,” and it almost always relates to the professional design of the slides (or lack thereof).
Usse the strategies below to use document design to make sure your slides are polished, professional, and easy to read.
Apply These Strategies to Your Project
- Use standard margins on all sides of your slides. Never run the text into the edges of the slides.
- Choose a font size that is large enough to read without magnification. At a minimum, use 24 point font size.
- Avoid fonts in all caps, since they decrease readability. See the LinkedIn Learning video “Avoid All Caps and Underlined Text Links to an external site.” for more information.
- Arrange your text so that uses flush left, ragged right alignment. See the #FridayFact: Centered Text Is Harder to Read and the #ThursdayThought: F-Shaped Reading Pattern Links to an external site..
- Apply the design principles of Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity (CRAP) to improve your document design. See the #ThursdayThought: Put CRAP in Your Document Design.
- Structure your document so the information is well-organized and easy to navigate. See the #WeekendWatch: Chunking Your Paragraphs into Readable Bites and the #FridayFact: Information-Rich Signposts Help Readers.
- Add strong headings and subheadings on your slides. See #FridayFact: Informative Headings Help Readers and the section on “Titles and Headings” in Chapter 11 of Markel and Selber’s Technical Communication (page 269–271).
- Uses well-integrated, well-designed visuals to clarify the information in your presentations. Most slides should include such graphics. See the tips on page 592 of Markel and Selber’s Technical Communication.
- Use the the Sample PowerPoint Presentation in the textbook, beginning on page 593 (Figure 21.4 in Chapter 21 of Markel and Selber’s Technical Communication) as an exemplar of document design. You can follow the practices in that presentation as you design your own.
Photo credit: 136/366 - Death by Powerpoint by Paul Hudson on Flickr Links to an external site., used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.