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These are interesting ideas for creative illustration, but I don't agree with the title that this is a guide for beginners. If you've never done a presentation before, the most fundamental graphic design principle to keep in mind (long before you might start thinking about Photoshop plugins!) is consistency.

I think that the first thing I would recommend for a beginner is to set the basic layout, typeface and background/foreground colours to something tasteful, perhaps also distinctive or using corporate colours if appropriate. These options will be under something like 'Styles' or 'Master Slide View' depending on the presentation software.

Sometimes, it can feel to me like a presentation flits between styles, as if it has been assembled by copying-and-pasting slides piecemeal from other talks. Starting by setting the default style, however, keeps a thread of visual consistency there while you experiment. After that, you can add logos that look like embroidery, glitch effects and what have you, but it will look much less chaotic than the result of creating the special effects first. It will truthfully be decoration, because you've already got a solid visual foundation to build upon.

If you'll excuse the vanity, following are the slides for a couple of my own presentations which I'm rather proud of :)

https://media.libreplanet.org/mgoblin_media/media_entries/27...

https://fosdem.org/2024/events/attachments/fosdem-2024-2719-...



It's a pretty common POV that bullet point slides are bad (there's an opposing view as well).

https://www.google.com/search?q=bullet+point+presentations+a...

From the POV that built point slides are bad, generally there is no consistency from slide to slide because each slide is just an image, graph, or diagram. I've seen plenty of great talks with zero consistency in the slides.


All platitudes are pure baloney, including this one.

Good slides are good slides, bullet points or not.

Slide’s message immediately grockable, not too jarring color scheme that’s appropriate for the occasion, and clear, crisp and concise language.

You can over do bullet points, but that’s true of every single element that’s commonly used in slides.




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