10.2 Design principles for people who are not designers

What you'll be able to do

Make slides look deliberate without being a designer. You will apply four principles you can name and three hard numbers, and you will cut content instead of shrinking it.

Before you start

Have your rebuilt master practice deck open. These principles get applied to it, slide by slide.

The work

1. Same either way: learn the four principles as a checklist you run on any slide. Alignment: everything sits on a shared line, and nothing is "about there". The Align tools from the visual-elements lesson are how you enforce it. Proximity: related things sit together and unrelated things sit apart, because distance itself groups information. Contrast: the important thing differs boldly from the rest in size or weight, and a timid difference reads as a mistake. Repetition: the same elements behave the same way on every slide, which is the master's job, now with its design name.
2. Same either way: here are the type numbers, and for a room they are not negotiable. Nothing under 24 points on a projected slide, because below that the back row is excluded and the slide has failed at its one job. Titles sit around 36 to 44 points. And at most two typefaces in the deck, one for headings and one for body, both set in the master's theme fonts. A deck that needs a third typeface needs a better idea, not another font.
3. Same either way: here is the palette number. Three colours plus a neutral: one main colour, one accent for emphasis, one more at most, and grey or near-black for the text. Set them as theme colours, as in the previous lesson, so that restraint is what happens by default. The contrast rules from the accessibility lesson matter twice as much on a projector, because a washed-out room kills pale text first.
4. Same either way: white space is a tool, not an absence. The empty area around content is what makes the content findable, and a slide filled edge to edge reads as noise. When content will not fit with space around it, the fix is cutting, never shrinking. Shrinking to 18 points keeps every word and loses every reader. Move what is left over into the notes pane, or onto a second slide with Ctrl+M, exactly as the six-line habit taught.
5. Same either way: run the audit on the practice deck, one minute per slide. Does everything align to something? Are related items grouped by distance? Is the one important thing unmistakable? Does the slide behave like its neighbours? Is every word 24 points or larger? Then the squint test: stand back, or shrink the window, until the text blurs. The slide's structure should still be readable as shapes. If the blur is an even mush, the slide has no hierarchy.

Try it

Audit five slides of the practice deck against the four principles and the three numbers. Fix the worst one properly. Align everything, group by proximity, make one element the loud one, and cut a third of the words rather than shrinking any. Then run the squint test again.

Check yourself