This year, I designed the cover based on recognisable elements and patterns of the Faculty of the Built Environment. I then applied a certain colour on top of all the images to subdue the many contrasting colours. Compare it to last year’s design.
This is what a nice presentation looks like: minimal, contains plenty of graphics, highlights important information and omits excessive information.
Chances are, your high school teacher or university lecturer has used PowerPoint to present information. And if you’re a design student, you’ve probably cringed at terrible slide design… like white text against a fluro-yellow background.
Here’s a set of template slides I created for the Blackboard Workshops held at the FBE in 2010:
Title slides should be in big font so the topic is clearly identifiable. This slide should be displayed as soon as you’ve set up your computer with a projector. How many students have suffered the embarrassment of walking to a lecture theatre only to realise a few minutes in they’re in the wrong lecture.
Information slides, actually, should not contain a lot of textual information. Create a visual hierarchy by using different colours for the title and text.
Important information slides should clearly highlight the information by drawing attention to it via visual cues (brackets, arrows) and colours (red ribbon).
Image slides, when possible should be full screen and of high quality. They should be cropped neatly of any unnecessary information.
Bullet point slides should be substituted with images when possible to make them more memorable. Highlight the point you are talking about so the audience can easily follow along.
I created a student TECH Guide for the Built Environment at UNSW. I had to break down pages of information and present them in bite size chunks – this naturally lead to a grid. And, because the Faculty is concerned with design, I based the design on the interface of Adobe Illustrator.
Images from Behance
You can never go wrong with shades of blue – it’s certainly a cool (albeit boring) cover. It feels a bit heavy towards the bottom left and it’s a shame there’s not much going on there… But refinement, refinement, refinement has made the cover progressively better – adding small ideas here and there – a bit more lighting, rescaling elements…
The cover was put together by Ars Thanea; additional concept art created in-house by Grzegorz Domaradzki.
Certainly beats these disastrous covers!