PowerPoint Slide Design

Huzzah! Just found the slides from Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero presentation over at Slideshare.



This is helpful not only as a takeaway from the video I posted yesterday, but also because it is a great example of simplicity-in-presentation.

I've really been working on moving to this type of slide design over the last year or so. Academia is really wrestling with PowerPoint right now. More universities are "requesting" that faculty use PowerPoint, but most faculty - new and old - frankly have now clue as to how to use the damn thing. Largely you get slides full of bullet point lists, from which the lecturer reads directly. Boring. Students, especially Freshmen and Sophomores, are used to "Death by PowerPoint" from the way in which their high school teachers employ it, and often have difficulty adapting, at first, to a more visually oriented format. But my Teaching Evaluations from last semester contained several comments about the quality and innovativeness of my PowerPoints, so all hope isn't lost.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite PowerPoints from last semester:



This one wasn't too bad either: