[MUSIC] >> Let's begin work on the second part of this milestone for your project. Our goals are to review the basic guidelines for creating slides and using your outline for your mini-business plan to create a set of slides for your presentation. To start, look at your outline of your plan and create a blank slide for each major heading. Don't worry about the marketing and financial sections yet. We'll talk more about that later. You can just leave them blank for now. Then think about the main points you want to make in each section. Write the main points for each section. You can use a bulleted list if you want, but you don't have to if you prefer to use more images. If you have more than three points per section, create another slide. Actually, for a presentation pitching an idea, you might want to just have one main point per slide with a couple of sub-points, like the example here. As you learned in our course on presentations, the purpose of slides is to help explain your ideas. Slides are not supposed to take the place of what you're saying. They're supposed to support what you're saying. Look at the outline of your plan and think about how a visual could help someone understand what you're saying. For example when you're explaining about your product or service, it's probably a good idea to have a diagram or picture. Remember the GRAYL water filter? Explaining how the filter works is much easier if you can show a diagram like this. Remember, you wouldn't just show the slide and say, look at this. You would show the slide and explain at the same time. Now look again at the points that you want to make in each slide. Ask yourself, do I really need that text? If you decide that the text will be helpful and you want to keep it, then ask yourself, can I make it shorter? Remember, using simple noun or verb phrases instead of sentences, can reduce the amount of text you have on the screen. If you have a bulleted list, check to make sure the structure is consistent. That is, you're using either all noun phrases, or all verb phrases or all questions in your list. As you learned before, once you have your text on your slides, think about readability. Make sure the font is large enough to read, make sure the font is consistent, meaning it is the same style, size and color. Now when I create slides for presentations I always come to the visual design last. It's something people can end up spending way too much time on. So I want to make sure I have my content ready first. You don't need to complete the final design right now for this week's milestone, so you could just keep it simple. However, if you do want to create a design, make sure the text contrasts well with the background and remember to make sure the slides aren't too busy, so that it would be distracting for your audience. Check that you have enough white or blank space between the text so that it stands out more. And finally, make sure any images, including background images you want to include, don't distract attention away from what you want to say. You don't need to add any animation at the moment, but again if you want to do that now, make sure it's simple and not distracting. Often just a simple reveal animation is the best. When you submit your slides, other people in the course will give you feedback so that you can make sure that your presentation slides will be effective. Use the feedback to make improvements to your slides. Good luck, and have fun creating your slides. And remember, keep it clear and simple, but also have fun. [MUSIC]
