Hi! I’m Tom Howell and I’m a bit of a PowerPoint nerd. This obsession with designing in PowerPoint led me to presentation design, developing my own digital design agency specialising in PowerPoint—so let’s look at the three methodologies for designing slides at scale.
1. Pass–through Methodology
Passing through means creating your slideshow element by element. For example, passing through every slide, copy/pasting the same header style across each slide, then going back and placing another design element.
The pass–through methodology is the fastest way to produce slide designs, particularly for long decks with short timeframes. Using this method ensures consistency with each design element, helping designs look cleaner faster.
This process is also useful for animation since animation elements can be applied and copied through Animation Painter, which makes things much more efficient compared to animating slides individually. Interactivity is also quite simple, since consistent elements such as navigation and menu buttons can be copied over numerous slides.
Due to the efficiency of this design process, your design is more methodical and likely won’t evolve. This is faster than the other methods, but it can result in a very standardised, almost template-like aesthetic. Also, this method can result in designs looking unfinished for longer, which is not ideal if you’re regularly sending drafts to clients for feedback.
2. Slide–by–slide Design
Slide-by-slide design is a thorough means of creating a presentation. Using this methodology, designers can focus on each slide individually and consecutively. Designs can evolve through this process, which can be good for creative output, but may result in regularly editing previous slides to ensure consistency.
This design methodology offers a lot more control over slide creation. Viewing slides individually often leads to greater creativity and more unique designs. Slide-by-slide design ensures designs look good from the beginning—in case your client requests a sneak peek of your design draft.
In terms of creating animation, this method provides designers with more finesse and control over the whole project. With greater control, slide-by-slide design can result in an evolving look that improves through practice and process.
Slide-by-slide is slower than the pass-through method. Designers may find it difficult to spend an equal amount of time on each slide, which can lead to over tinkering and attention-to-detail errors.
The thoroughness of this process isn’t suited to short deadlines as designers may find themselves rechecking previous slides to ensure consistencies as the design evolves.
3. Branching Design
Branching design methodology requires planning out each section prior to design and understanding the whole presentation before beginning your design process. Designers need to understand the key slides, where to split things, and where to make structural changes such as segmenting, applying dividers, and titles.
Since it requires prior planning and mapping out, the branching method starts slow but increases in efficiency throughout the process. It’s also much easier to create cohesion quickly.
Creating animation with this method is similar to the pass-through methodology as you set the style for one section and then copy it over to streamline the design process. Branching design is helpful for long documents since preparation can ultimately streamline production.
The branching design method is also useful for producing print, because you set up master slides for elements such as dividers and titles. This method works well when creating interactive content, since you can carry over concepts like breadcrumb trails across numerous slides.
This process is the slowest to start, which introduces a sharp design curve at the beginning. The inability to see progress can hinder creativity and motivation. However, by sequencing the slides and concepts properly, using the branching design method can be a thorough and ultimately effective process.
