Design Phase

Hello everyone,

I'm starting this week's blog by wishing health to you and your families. The topic I'm going to introduce you with is "The Design Phase of a PowerPoint presentation." I chose PowerPoint from all of the other alternatives because it's a lot easier for students to work with, and it is the most popular amongst apps used to make presentations.

There are a lot of factors that contribute to the design phase of a presentation such as goals and outcomes, the outline of the components, intent of the project and its target audience.

First things first, when stating a project we have to determine the target audience; how will the audience contribute and influence the content.

 Next we have to create flowcharts. But what is a flowchart? A flowchart is what depicts the sequence and structure of a program. There are several ways we can build a flowchart, for example by using tree structures, clusters, star designs etc. 

From my experience the problem I mostly encounter while designing a presentation is how much is too much? By this I mean how much information should I include in my presentation so that it is well structured and straightforward but by no means boring or filled with unnecessary information. 

The best way to make this happen, in my opinion is to take down notes. It is better to design an outline of the presentation before we actually start it. The outline must include the ways on how you want your presentation to be, its title, how many slides long you want it to be based on what you are asked to do. Then you should write down subtopics and subheadings with a specific order you want to convey. 

After building the slides and having finished the content part of the presentation, I like to go ahead with the designs. I usually chose slide designs that contain neutral colours, so that the attention goes to the information I'm providing, but still I want them to be nice for the eyes. As for transitions and animations I am not into them that much. I usually design my presentations using just one of them applied on all slides. I like to include pictures and videos to my presentations so that they have more than just linear information and dull facts. 

Feel free to leave down your comments below,