Sam Thatte

Contrast- The Drama Queen of Presentation Design!

I recently hosted a webinar to share presentation design principles to help the attendees step up their design skills and create presentations that looked just a little more polished and professional than the average.

That webinar was called, “C.R.A.P. – Why some presentations stink and others don’t. The title was certainly memorable and so was the content. Take a look at what one of the attendee’s wrote to me!

Thanks so much for the webinar today – it contained tools that would work for someone just starting presentations or people, like myself, who have had to do our fair share of them over the years.
For me, the best take-away was the idea of the contrast – especially the way you colored certain blocks of text that both tied them together and distinguished them all at the same time. That was very cool!
Nicole Leiren

C.R.A.P in case you are wondering is an acronym for Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity. So I decided to create some videos on the principles of C.R.A.P and share on my blog! This is the first video in the series and I hope it helps you to build better presentations!

To summarize, Contrast is probably the single most important thing when it comes to bringing clarity to your presentation design. If one element of your slide is different than another, emphasize the differences. Make it really different. If it is small, make it tiny! If it is big make it huge! And remember to also use contrasts in color to create that drama.

If you would be interested in attending the webinar that this post was based on, comment below so I know of your interest. Here is some more feedback I got from that webinar!

I like the way you explained white space. We hear the term all the time, but your visual demonstration of positive & negative white space makes it simple to understand the why and how of it.
Yvonne Woytovich

I really enjoyed your presentation, I can tell you that from past experience, keeping it to 45 minutes max was good.
Teri Ortega

I’m changing the size of some of my text as we speak! I realized that I used a lot of medium sized text in my presentation on local rewards. I also have reduced the opacity of some of my backgrounds to improve the contrast. I’m so happy already! 🙂
Alyssa Penman

Keep up the good work and I’ll keep following.
Celeste M. Flye

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