« Dreaming in Code | Main | Higher Female Enrollment at Universities »

February 06, 2007

My Slide Template Can Pwn Your Slide Template

Engineering Excellence puts on various events, and usually we will have a different Powerpoint slide template for each one. This is to unify the talks at one event and differentiate them from other events. The slide template covers not just the background image and font, but also the colors for titles, bullets, tables, and various predefined shapes. There is an artist in the group who works all this stuff out.

I just got the slide template for an upcoming conference I am speaking at, and let me tell you this is the baddest slide template I have ever seen. I'm probably not supposed to post details in public, but let's just say the slide background looks like what you would see from inside a black hole, and it just goes from there. The colors are sui generis. Most templates have a slide warning you away from certain colors that don't show up well at a distance (red on royal blue is one common mistake). Well, for this template the warning is not to use gold or purple. The fact that the other colors might actually warp your brain enough to make you even consider gold or purple should tell you just how outre they are. With the visual pummeling that the title slide should administer, I doubt I even need to prepare the rest of the presentation.

It's normal to feel this way about a slide template, isn't it?

Posted by AdamBa at February 6, 2007 07:06 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://proudlyserving.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/549

Comments

you need to pimp your slide template.

doesn't the artist have to send out a slide template review like devs have to send out a code review before checking in?

do you know the artist personally?

Posted by: at February 7, 2007 10:37 AM

This is why PowerPoint 2007 ships with color schemes and mapped colors. It gives you a set of colors which work well together and switches the colors when the background is dark or light.

http://blogs.msdn.com/powerpoint/archive/2006/07/13/664413.aspx

Posted by: Chris Becker at February 7, 2007 05:48 PM

It occurs to me that when I said "baddest", it may not have been obvious that I meant that in an extremely positive way. I didn't mean it was "bad": I meant it would just as soon knock over your grandmother as look at you.

Now THAT should clear things up.

- adam

Posted by: Adam Barr at February 7, 2007 07:05 PM

Ah, in that case it may help to use the technical term: "most bad ass"

Posted by: Chris Becker at February 8, 2007 12:40 AM