Corporate PowerPoint templates are often (in fact, most of the time) too busy and too cluttered for presentation design. Lots of graphics that is repeated on each page, big logos with reflections, legal disclaimers, huge page numbers, all of this eats valuable screen real estate. Depending on how strongly the corporate communication department insists, here are some work-arounds:
- The most radical option: go into the slide master and take all the unnecessary stuff out. [view, slide master]. But then do something extra: go into [design, create new theme colors] and enter the exact RGB colors of your company's color scheme, a step that is often overlooked in corporate templates
- Keep the front page, but design a presentation full of large images that you stretch across the page (including the cluttered graphical elements). "What, I did stick to the template, the images just did not fit in in any other way".
- If 1 and 2 do not work, create a window inside a window: design your slides inside the frame that is left, using the correct corporate colors and ignoring the bullet point default template. If the window is consistent, the audience will slowly loose the attention for the clutter around your chart, in pretty much the same way as is the case in big conference halls with distracting sponsor logos around the projector screen.
Thank you Gonzalo Álvarez Marañón for suggesting this topic.