But with PowerPoint comes PowerPoint-Slide-Design-Fatigue - there are only a limited number of PowerPoint slide designs, and by now everyone's seen almost all of them countless times. The only impact on your audience that using a standard PPT slide design will have is "Oh, he's using that design. How dull."
The solution? Photographs.
No, not snapshots of the library - I'm talking about professional-looking images that really catch the eye. Ones that are appropriate for the environment, and which are interesting to look at. And (and here's the trick) ones that can be used legally - using good-looking pictures from a quick Google Images search without checking their copyright status is out of the question.
I'll be mainly using two sources:
- Photographs in Microsoft clip art
- Creative Commons content on Flikr
What's more, I'll be using them for two different puposes:
- Background images for text
- "Spacer" images - no text, just the image, used to separate slides with content
The "spacer" images may seem superfluous to some, but to my mind they are very important. They break up the presentation so that it's not just a continuous stream of text, and they provide something that might just catch someone's interest and get them watching the screen.
Furthermore, whilst I intend to use images that are relevant to health and medicine, I fully intend to also use images that are not directly relevant, but which I think look nice (for want of a better word) or interesting. Of course, what makes for a "nice" or interesting image is an entirely subjective judgement on my part - c'est la vie.
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