Design Principles

The seven design principles

Empty Space

The Empty Space principle highlights the power of clean, concise, and simple design that allows the essential items to be more pronounced and powerful due to the absence of busy information on the slide. This principle can be described as the "less is more" principle that can be applied to almost every scenario: having less, makes what is present more or louder. But this is particularly important in presentation design so the viewer does not experience information overload. By adding as little content as possible, the content you include gains more focus and power on the slide, as this will be the only thing the viewer focuses on.

Picture Superiority Effect

The Picture Superiority Effect principle states that the information presented in an image will be remembered longer than the words listened to, especially if the image is presented for a short amount of time. This principle is particularly effective when you want to reinforce or highlight the most essential information in your lecture or presentation. Having a concrete visual that highlights the main point helps communicate the information to the viewer in an easier way than just talking about the main points. For example, this picture communicates so much to the viewer about the systematic lack of access for people with disabilities, with only a picture.

Signal vs. Noise Ratio

The Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) principle is the ratio of essential information being conveyed on the slide to the irrelevant items. In a given design, you want to have the highest signal to noise ratio possible, meaning that you want to remove all irrelevant and possibly distracting items on your slide. This included removing all images, lines, text, numbers, and graphics that do not add value to the design or improve the viewer's comprehension of the information being presented to them. By failing to remove the irrelevant information, you create a busy slide that is confusing for the viewer to understand.

Contrast

Contrast is the design principle that states you should make what you want the viewer to notice different, as we instinctively notice what is different first. To make something different and stand out on a slide, you create a contrast between the most important thing and everything else on your slide. This can be achieved by using color, texture, size, shape, and text to grab the viewer's attention by altering these elements to create a drastic difference between the less important information and the most important information. For example, your eyes are immediately drawn to the green/yellow apple on its side instead of all the blue content on the slide.

Alignment

Alignment is the principle that emphasizes the importance of items on your slides aligning with one another. To make a slide feel clean and professional, it is vital that the items on the slide align. This also helps other design principles shine. It may not seem like a big deal, but the lack of slide alignment conveys to the viewer that this is not professional, important, or quality work. Failing to give attention to detail in your slides, such as aligning slide items, conveys to the audience that you put little thought into your slides, which might lead them to believe that the content of the presentation is also not reliable and well thought out.

Repetition

Repetition is the design principle that focuses on consistency and uniformity within a presentation. By consistently using the same types of fonts, the same color pallet, and the same style of presentation, the viewer perceives each slide in your presentation to be a part of a cohesive whole instead of separate items in a group. However, being too consistent can turn into redundancy and repetitiveness, which makes the viewer disengage from your presentation because of the lack of variety in the slides. It is vital to have consistent elements within a presentation to achieve a unified presentation, but it is also equally as important to establish verity to prevent losing the viewer's attention.

Proximity

Proximity is the design principle that helps organize information on your slide to help the viewer understand how all the information you are presenting relates to each other. This principle emphasizes that items related to each other, such as a description of an image and the image, are placed closely together to minimize confusion on the viewer's part. Moreover, it is important to know what information should be together and how much information should be on each slide. Proximity can help you influence where the viewer looks first and second, which informs your decision on where you want to place each item in relation to the other.

Reflection

The two most important principles, in my opinion, are the Signal vs. Noise Ratio and the Contrast principle. Using the signal vs. noise ratio principle helps me to focus each slide on a single idea, and then I'm able to remove everything irrelevant, making the slides clean, concise, understandable, and sleek. The fact that the principle is based on approaching the relevance of each item in the presentation, evaluating it, and then placing or removing it in an appropriate way based on its pourpos aligns with my approach to design, so that is the principle that I rely on the most. I considered picking empty space over the signal vs. noise principles, but I find that the process of effectively using the signal vs. noise principle often results in the empty space automatically. Moreover, I find the process of finding what the focus of the slide is and taking everything away that is not the most important part, to make more sense and often creates empty space that is easy to leverage on its own. Instead of working first from the empty space principle of just highlighting one thing on the slide, I prefer the signal vs. noise approach. Next, I find that contrast is key in any design. Failing to have contrast between the important and less important elements creates confusion, which is not good. Moreover, not having good contrast between your background color and the font color of the text on the screen can make the slides very hard to read, and even inaccessible to people with vision problems and some with dyslexia. Using the contrast principle ensures that the slides are clear, understandable, and organized, which I find to be some of the most important elements in a presentation. So, even though the other principles are very important and impactful, I feel that the lack of these principles would drastically reduce the level of clarity and professionalism in any slide set; therefore, I chose these principles.