To start off, Damon broke the myth that slides are there to support you. They support the audience, the people you’re communicating your message to. Thus, visual hierarchy is needed to ease orientation in the sea of information before the audience and basically help them get the gist of it. Visual hierarchy is about the neat composition of graphic elements on the slides and Damon emphasized the importance of having clean and simple slides with no chunky blocks of text. 

Who says what’s right and wrong with type fonts? There are no good or bad ones, there are only good and bad ways of treating them. Damon’s advice is to think well what typeface would suit your brand identity because this choice can influence decision making.  

Tip: If your company uses its own typeface, you should stick to it so as not to breach brand guidelines. This is very important and is probably highlighted in the company brand book, so read it carefully before starting to design your slides. 

Damon’s message is simple: forget about stock images that literally scream “stock images”. Even if you’re using any, try to come up with more interesting, metaphorical ones.  

Of course, you can do what you like but make sure you select visuals that are authentic and relatable, meaning such that represent both your brand and the audience. It’s worth going the extra mile and finding images that are not super literal versions of your ideas. 

One of the last points Damon made was about design being above all functional, not just pretty. So how do we translate this into our slides? We keep our mind on the message we want to convey and try to remove all distractions like too much text, too many scattered visuals, poor composition of elements. Remove the fluff, simplify and go. We second that, Damon! 

In the final minutes of his talk Damon gave us a crash tutorial on how to give boring company templates some oomph. Of course, it’s much better to see it, than read about it. The whole video session is in the Design track recordings, be our guest.