Tools for presentation design and -planning with PowerPoint
Today I share two PowerPoint documents. One, laid out for printing in DIN A4, is a collection of storyboard templates. The other is a collection of grids constructed from very slim and elongated rectangles. By activating "snap objects to other objects" in the view=>guidelines menu of PowerPoint, you can position your on screen elements with a spacing between them if you snap to the borders of the rectangles, or tile your slide elements seamlessly by snapping to the orange lines running through their center. After you finish your slides, you can easily delete the grid, which is a grouped object. The tools are inspired by my own need and by "slide:ology", Nancy Duarte's manifesto for better presentations (see pages 100 ff. explaining various grids and giving examples for their use).
The Grids
The page-format in this document is 40cm x 30cm, which made the calculation of the correct spacing very much easier. Just rescale in Powerpoint to your desired pageformat.
The Storyboard
The storyboard templates are intended for pen and paper, not for on-screen-sketching; the paper-size therefore is A4 in portrait layout with appropriate printer-margins. Inside you find:
One page with blank slides and lines for text.
Two pages with grids on the slides:- 3 x 4
- 4 x 4
- 5 x 4
- 5 x 5
- 6 x 6 according to Fibonacci
The guidelines allow for easy duplication and repositioning of the desired grid.
Everyone may use these tools, change them and distribute them freely under the following creative-commons license:
Attribution (drop my name, please, if you share this work)
Non-commercial (you are not allowed to sell this or derivatives of this work. You may use this within your professional context, though.)
Share alike (derivatives or copies of this work must be published under the same conditions)
For reference, see: http://creativecommons.org
