You can’t ‘guild the lily’, you shouldn’t put a bling earring on a baby, and a dog is never improved by a leather coat. It’s already got one, hasn’t it? Yes, these are matters of taste, and taste is a very personal thing, but there are some things you should just know.
If you’ve got a beautiful thing, you don’t need to do much to make it stand out. This is exactly the way you should view the use of animations and transition effects in PowerPoint.
For PowerPoint, all you need to know is that a beautiful slide is seldom improved by special effects. Bullet points screeching across the screen or key messages exploding before you like fireworks are all very well when you’re still at school and having to prove to your teacher that you really do know what all the different buttons in Powerpoint actually do; but when you grow up and want to be taken seriously in the real world, think carefully.
Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you HAVE to do it.
My advice would be to limit your use of PowerPoint animations and transition effects to just three options: APPEAR, FADE or WIPE (which is particularly effective when revealing arrows and bar charts). And don’t use them on every slide. It’s too predictable and your audience will soon become bored, distracted (or worse).
For more of my PowerPoint Design tips, see here.
Pingback: Simplify your Data – which type of presentation chart to use and when