Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Before and After Slide Design

I do like designing things. It appeals to my creative side, and keeps whatever artsy inclinations I have from completely withering away... In fact, I try my hand at designing shirts, posters, and the occasional logo.

Today somebody asked me to send them a process schematic for a particular project I am working on. The details really aren't important, but what IS important is that while trying to locate a schematic - ANY schematic, I realized I didn't have a nice diagram of what's going on. The closest I could find was a slide buried in the backup section of a PowerPoint presentation I had given.

Figure: And in my defense, this wasn't even a slide that I originally made - it was a teammate's.

I decided that this was unacceptable, and I couldn't bear to send out something quite that unprofessional. And so in the 15 minutes I had before a conference call, I rearranged the slide.


It's still not great, but at least less cluttered, and perhaps a little clearer. It made me feel better to at least take a stab at it. Good figures are important.

What do you think - I know it's hard without understanding the context, but at first blush was this an improvement? Or no better?

3 comments:

  1. Definitely better - looks much more professional. The continuous loop between all the steps is also more obvious with a circular diagram rather than a rectangular diagram.

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  2. The pictures are still too small and there is WAY too much green. It looks like something Microsoft would put in their templates, which does not count as professional.

    The information content of the slide is still slight.

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  3. I disagree with gasstationwithoutpumps. I think it’s definitely an improvement. Not the best slide I’ve ever seen, but definitely OK. Nothing really unprofessional about it.

    (BTW, I’m an engineer w/10 yrs experience who delivers a presentation at least every 1-2 mo. People routinely compliment me on my talks/slides. :-) )

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