Yes, I have a lot of pet peeves with regard to presentation design, but at the top of the list is header bars. Often–though not always–it is necessary and/or helpful to have a title to your slide (a “header”). But when it comes to designing a “look” or a template for a presentation, it is almost never a good thing to design your slides so that they require a header. We’ve all seen templates like these…
Designs with dedicated headers should be avoided because they…
- Waste valuable screen real estate
- Force the user to write headlines when they may not be necessary, leading to cluttered and over-written slides
- Create an inorganic “PowerPoint-y” look
Even good presentation designers often fall into the header bar trap, and I place the blame largely on Microsoft. PowerPoint is the only program I can think of in which the default “empty” page tells the user what kind of information should be placed on the page. Open up a blank PPT doc and you are immediately told to insert a header and body copy. Microsoft Word doesn’t tell you what kind of words to put down; it just gives you a white page. Photoshop doesn’t give you a page at all, less they bias you against a teal or a zebra-striped canvas.
But back to the waste of space. Take a look at this Microsoft-design template that comes pre-installed with PPT.
If you used this template for each page, after you inserted your mandatory header, you would have only 51% of your entire page left for actual content. If you always used Microsoft’s recommended “click to add text” content area, you’d only have 38% usable space! Note that on this template, Microsoft has added in a further, unnecessary gray bounding box (your screen should be your bounding box…) that further reduces usable area after you account for needed padding on the edges–text will always need a cushion of negative space around it to be readable.
Yes, Microsoft does provide a header-less layout for this template design, but the natural instinct is to keep the background the same for all slides, which then leads to unnecessary and often visually redundant headlines. Last weekend I was at a wine seminar on a Spanish wine region called Ribera Del Duero. I’ve recreated one of the slides showing the growing region. Since we talked about no other geography other than Ribera, my reaction to the use of a header bar on this page was a resounding, “Duh.” The header bar design in the template forced the presenter to include a header even when it was painfully unnecessary, forcing the content smaller, and distracting from it.
Even if you reduce the size of a header bar design, you’re still bound for trouble. The above examples are large enough to account for 2 line headers (if you absolutely must have a 2 line header…), but if you try to minimize the header area as shown here, you’re just going to run into problems with that one slide that just must have 2 or 3 lines for some reason.
So, what’s the solution? Keep as open and blank a canvas as you possibly can that allows for a header or title to come and go as needed. And if you can find or create a design that doesn’t fore the use of headers, you’ll be on your way to making slide headers the exception rather than the rule. Which is a good thing…
