Slide Standards

Is there a standard for designing slides that are projected to an audience or
one person in front of a computer terminal?

I am sure by now there has to be studies available for using colors, font
and etc sizes.

Anyone know of a standard guide out there?

Hi,

That, madam or sir, is a very good question.

Anyone??? I have some buried somewhere but it would be good for the faq, if
it doesn't already exist.

--

Regards,

Glen Millar
Microsoft PPT MVP

Tutorials and PowerPoint animations at
www.pptworkbench.com

glen at pptworkbench dot com

Please tell us your PowerPoint / Windows version,
whether you are using vba, or
anything else relevant

"fltpro" wrote in message
news
Is there a standard for designing slides that are projected to an audience
or
one person in front of a computer terminal?

I am sure by now there has to be studies available for using colors, font
and etc sizes.

Anyone know of a standard guide out there?

In article , Fltpro wrote:
Is there a standard for designing slides that are projected to an audience or
one person in front of a computer terminal?

I am sure by now there has to be studies available for using colors, font
and etc sizes.

Here's something I wrote a gazillion years ago and never quite updated for this
century. Still, screen inches are still screen inches and eyeballs are
eyeballs. It's a start.

h3Problem/h3
How can you make sure your presentation will be legible to everyone, no matter
what size room you're in?

h3Solution/h3
How would you feel if you looked out at your audience and found that they were
all blindfolded? After all the time you put into creating your presentation,
I'm betting you wouldn't be a happy presenter.

Your audience probably wouldn't be too pleased either, hearing you say things
like "As you can see in this slide ..." when in fact they couldn't see
stronganything/strong.

Using illegible slides is like blindfolding your audience. It's also a lot like
shooting yourself in the foot. The surprising thing is how often presenters
hobble themselves this way, considering how easy it is to do it right.

Here's how you can avoid the pitfalls of illegibility and help your audience see
the light.

strongPlaying to the cheap seats/strong
The key to legibility is making sure that your audience, even the folks waaaayy
in the back row, can easily read the text on your slides. As soon as they start
to squint, you've lost them.

Make your text big enough and you've nearly won the battle. Big text is
readable text.

How big is "big enough?" That depends on the particular situation. A complete
answer would have to take into account the size of the room and screen, lighting
conditions, age of the audience and a host of other considerations. The
complete answer and calculator drill is a bit further on. The short answer is
...

strongThe 8H Rule/strong
The 8H Rule is an old standard in the audiovisual industry to guarantee legible
projected text. It says that the last row of seating should be no further away
from the screen than eight times the height of the screen (8H). Make your text
at least 1/50th the height of the screen, and everybody in the room will be able
to read your text.

If you're forced to use a room that's twice as long as the 8H rules says it
should be, simply double your minimum text height. If you know you'll be working
with a big screen in a small room, you can use smaller text. Like most rules of
thumb, and like the thumb they were named after, the 8H Rule is adaptable.

And like most rules, there are plenty of exceptions. More on that later.

strongCaveat Projector/strong
There are a few things about the 8H Rule you should keep in mind. First and
foremost: the rule recommends minimum legible text heights, not ideal
easy-to-read text heights. If you follow the rule, your text will be readable,
but not necessarily strongcomfortably/strong readable. If you want your
audience to love you, don't make them uncomfortable.

You can generally use minimum size text for chart axis labels, footnotes and the
like, but when it comes to bulleted lists and other "must read" text, do your
audience a favor. Make the text considerably bigger than the minimum size.

If you need to use the minimum size most of the time for most of your text,
you're cramming too much information onto each slide.

The 8H Rule also assumes that your audience's vision is normal or nearly so. If
you're speaking to an older group, use larger text, or invent the (Insert Your
Name Here) 7H Rule of Text Legibility.

strongMatters of style/strong
In the presentation business, it's what you say AND how you say it that counts.
The text style you choose can have a big effect on legibility.

Should you use serif or sans-serif text? That's always a good question to set
off a debate with. Many feel that a serif typestyle such as Times-Roman makes
it easier for the eye to distinguish the various letterforms quickly, leading to
faster, easier comprehension. Others argue that sans-serif faces like Helvetica
are simpler, hence more legible.

Personally, I suspect that the typestyle we see most often is the one we read
most easily. Serif text is used more often than sans-serif in newspapers,
magazines and advertisements here in the U.S. so serif text might be the best
choice. In Europe, the situation is probably reversed.

I can tell you from personal experience that those of us with astigmatism find
serif text much easier on the eyes.

Whichever typeface you choose, avoid the so-called "decorative" faces ...
unusual fonts or styles that look like anything from handwriting to the
Gutenberg Bible. They're fun and can be useful for emphasis if used sparingly,
but they're very hard to read in bouts of more than one or two words at a time.
If you can't imagine reading a whole magazine
article in a particular face, don't use it in your presentation.

Even if you've settled on several "standard" faces, it's best to limit yourself
to one or at most two distinct faces in any single presentation. If you need to
emphasize certain words or areas of text, you can always use italic or boldface,
or set the text off in a different color, but using too many different faces
clutters up your slides.

No matter what you've heard or seen, setting your text all in capital letters is
a bad idea. It looks as though you're SHOUTING.

Besides looking loud, all-caps text is less legible than text in caps and
lowercase. We tend to scan whole lines of text at a time when we read, and we
recognize common words as much by their overall shapes as by reading the
individual letters. Lowercase letters have much more variety of size and form
than capitals, and make word shapes more visually distinctive. A line of text
in capitals has relatively little variation in the shapes of the words, so we
have to read the individual letters. That slows us down and makes harder work
of reading.

I have this pet theory that the typewriter is the root of all evil in
presentation graphics. A full exposition of this notion will have to wait for
some other time, but one bit of evidence in support of this is the way people
use capitalization, underlining and other such "typewriterisms" for emphasis,
even though they have better tools at their disposal.

Larger text sizes, boldfacing or color are far more effective ways of
emphasizing particularly important points.

strongBe a good host/strong
Think of yourself as a host, and your audience as your guests. Go out of your
way to make them comfortable and your presentation will be a success. Anything
that gets in the way of their comfort needs to be fixed or eliminated.

You wouldn't think of deliberately mumbling your way through a presentation,
right? Of course not! Well, using hard-to-read slides is the visual equivalent
of mumbling. What your audience can't read, they won't read. What they
can't see, they won't be as likely to remember. They will remember you, though.
As the one that made that hour or two in the dark such a frustrating and
unrewarding experience.

Both you and your audience win when you follow these simple guidelines. You can
be that much more certain that your slides will be clear and concise, understood
and remembered.

================================================== ==================

Ok, kids, get out your calculators.

Earlier, we mentioned some general rules of thumb for establishing minimum
legible text heights for "average" situations.

What's "average"? And what if you'll be presenting under sub-average
conditions? How can you be sure your audience will be able to read your slides?

The ideal situation is summed up by the 8H Rule:

The distance from the screen to the last row of seats should be no more than 8
times the height of the screen.

The smallest text should be at least 1/50 the height of the screen.

If you meet those two conditions, your audience should be able to read you loud
and clear.

The 8H Rule is fine as far as it goes, but it assumes that we have control over
over all the variables. But what if the room is bigger than we expected? What
if the only screen available is dinky? And since we don't usually know all the
details in advance, what can we do to give ourselves a little margin of safety?

Herewith, the tricks of the trade

First, let's set out the variables we have to work with:

Distance to Back Row, or DBR
How far is it from the screen to the last row of seats?

Effective Screen height, or SH
How tall is the screen? This might not be the same as the actual screen height.
If you're projecting horizontal PowerPoint slides on a 48" square screen, the
full 48" vertical screen height won't be used. It'll be 36" (3/4 of 48" since
PowerPoint slides are usually in 3x4 proportions.)

We'll start by reducing the assumptions made by the 8H Rule to an absolute
minimum text height for your particular presentation room.

Working from the 8H Rule, DBR/8 * 1/50 we simplify to DBR/400 as the minimum
text height on screen. Find the distance to the back row (in inches) and divide
by 400. If you have a 32 foot (or 384 inch) long room, 384/400 gives a minimum
text size on screen of about 1 inch. Don't make your text any smaller than that
and everybody should be able to read it.

Fine, but how are you supposed to know how big the text will be on the silver
screen while you're creating it in PowerPoint? That depends on the screen
height, and the text size you choose. You'll need to know the screen height for
the next round of calculations.

Since the relationship between the projected text height (PTH) and screen height
(SH) is the same as the relationship between PowerPoint's text size (PTS) and
the drawing page height (DPH), we can use a simple ratio to come up with our
answer.

DPH / SH = PTS / PTH

Let's say we have a standard 48" x 48" screen in the same 32 foot room. We
already know we need the text to be 1" high (PTH=1) and since we're using
slides, we can project the image 36" high (3/4 of 48") so SH=36.

If your drawing page height (DPH) is 7.33 (as it will be if you're set up
properly for 35mm slides in most Win apps):


7.33 DPH X PTS
------- = ----- or (7.33 DPH * 1 PTH) / 32 SH = X FTS
32 SH 1 PTH

A little calculator drill gives you .229 or approximately 16 points as the
minimum text height you should use ... in this situation. Use 18 or 20 point
text to give yourself a little margin for error.

Another useful trick is to calculate how far you have to stand away from your
monitor to estimate the legibility of your projected graphics.

Start with the actual height (in inches) of the drawing page as it's displayed
on your monitor ... NOT the size displayed on any drawing rulers on your screen.
Let's call it MH for Monitor height. We want to solve for X, where X is how
far away you need to be from your monitor.

DBR X
--- = --- or (DBR * MH) / SH = X
SH MH

If we stick with the same 32 foot (or 384") room, same 32" screen height and
assume that the height of the image shown on your monitor is 6".

384 X
--- = --- or (384 * 6) / 32 = X = 72
32 6

From this, it appears that if you stand 72" or 6 feet away from your monitor
while you work on your presentation, you'll have a good idea what your slides or
overheads will look like to the people in the back row.

Substitute 8.5", the height of a letter-size landscape page, for MH and you can
calculate how long your arms need to be in order to use your printouts to judge
screen legibility instead of the monitor. (Hint: if they're long enough,
you're either giving your presentation in a very small room, projecting on an
astonishingly large screen, or you've made a mistake in your arithmetic.)

How about this scenario: You already have your slides made up and the
presentation is tomorrow morning. You don't have the time or budget to change
anything, but you have a hunch that your slides are going to be hard to read in
the 64 foot deep room you'll be working in. What do you do?

With a little luck, you can get a larger projection screen for your
presentation. How big a screen do you need?

Call up one of your slides in PowerPoint. Move away from the monitor until you
have trouble reading the text, then move closer until the text is easy to read
again.

Measure the distance to the monitor (DTM) and apply this formula:

MH X
--- = --- or (MH * DBR) / DTM = X
DTM DBR

So if your monitor height is 6" as before, the room is 64 feet deep (DBR = 64 x
12, or 768") and you find that you can't read the monitor at a distance of more
than 5 feet (DTM = 60") ...

6 X
--- = --- or (6 * 768) / 60 = 76.8
60 768

... meaning you'll need to order a screen about 76 inches high. And don't forget
to allow for slide proportions ... 76 is 2/3 of the width you'll need, so you'd
better make sure that the screen is 3/2 of 76" wide, or ... drat! My calculator
battery just died. We'll leave that final calculation as an exercise for the
reader.

strongTake it to the MAX, not the MIN/strong
Remember, all these calculations represent the absolute minimum text sizes
needed for legibility, not for easy reading. Depending on room conditions and
the age of your audience, you could be cutting it a bit thin if you rely
strictly on the sizes these formulas suggest. Your audience will have an easier
time of it (and love you the better for it) if you use larger text sizes
whenever possible.

p class="searchterms"Search terms:/p

-----------------------------------------
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
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