Presentation Secrets: Do What you Never Thought Possible With Your Presentations

UNITED WORLD IN A SLIDE DECK

Your slides are a separate reality. It's a different world with its own laws. You are the master of this world, its creator, and you are responsible for setting up those laws. What colors exist in this universe? Is it 3D or 2D? Is it hand-made or computer-generated? It is new or old? Is it classy or informal? One of the tests for truth, for believing in something, is consistency and coherence. Do the elements match one another or do they conflict? When you're adding a shadow to a text box, ask yourself if you have shadows in this world. If one box has a shadow, everything else must have a shadow, too. There are many questions to answer, and it will be actually easier for you to borrow most of the laws from the reality you see around yourself every day. We don't see many text boxes around us, do we? However, we see a lot of signs with frames. It could be a road sign made of tin or just a piece of paper affixed to a wall. What physical object does your text box represent? Is it paper? Is it glass? Is it stone? Is it metal?

FIGURE 7-26: Combining pictures and text.

What about letters? In our reality letters could be printed, written, or drawn. If they are big enough they can also be physical and have depth, drop shadow, create a reflection. This could work just for a few letters, not for a large block of text. What about lines? A line could be drawn with ...