Presentation Templates

At the TLA, we have company-mandated templates which we are required to use whenever PowerPoint must be inflicted upon an audience. There are some fine reasons to have the people in charge of corporate identity managing how employees project the image of the company out to customers. Particularly when the company in question is a massive, sprawling multinational. It’s good to present a uniform face and ‘story’.

The templates however are incredibly inadequate, managing to not only tacitly encourage poor presentation style, but also fail aesthetically. I’m not sure how this works for the company. The slides look ugly and amateurish, and surely cheapens the brand.

I have another bone to pick while I am up here, steady on my soapbox – Typefaces. This same company, with quite a lot of resources at its disposal can’t manage to license a real typeface for use in documents produced by employees. Thus, we must use Arial, in lieu of Helvetica, which is the official typeface for the company. Arial.

… Arial.

If Helvetica is too expensive to license, what’s wrong with commissioning a typeface? Why can’t a big company attend to its own appearance? To its credit however, TLA has a simply brilliant, ageless logo which works well in a multitude of contexts, which I dearly hope isn’t modernised into some meaningless swirl any time soon.

A positive example of attention to appearance which I’m seeing a lot of at the moment is StatoilHydro. They have commissioned a slight variant of a readable, modern typeface. You see it used in all communications from the very top all the way down to relatively informal notices posted around the workplace. Simple, clean presentation designs are used. In one, the only graphic element is the logo placed in the lower-right corner. No unnecessary embellishments, structural aides, gradients, fills or lines. Just the branding and the content with a good measure of whitespace. Winner.