UCSB Grad Slam
slide design expertise & advice
- Tips to a Beautiful Powerpoint, by Eugene Cheng
- The Four Most Important Powerpoint Rules for Effective Presentations, by Ned Potter
- Introduction to Slide Design, by Alex Rister
- Slide Design for Developers, by Zach Holman
- Slideology, by Nancy Duarte
- Presentation Zen & Presentation Zen Design & Presentation Tips by Garr Reynolds
design principles
CRAP
- The Big Four, by Garr Reynolds
- The Non-Designers Design Book, by Robin Williams (4th edition, 2014)
Other useful design approaches and resources:
- Clean Up Your Mess, Daniel Higginbotham
- Remove to Improve
- 7 Essentials of Graphic Design, Allison Goodman
- Universal Principles of Design , Lidwell, Holden & Butler
- Design Basics Index, Jim Krause
- (charts & graphs), Darkhorse Analytics
stock & copyright-friendly images
- Unsplash
- Pexels
- MorgueFile
- Multicolr: search for images by color
- Photofunia: put your own text or image into existing images
- Remove Image Background: a free online site where you can remove solid-colored backgrounds before placing your image in your slide
fonts
- Google fonts: 1482 font families, all free and easy to download
- Top 50 Google font pairings
- Google Fonts Knowledge: resources on all aspects of typography
- Google Fonts Glossary: defines key typographic terms with examples
- dafont
- urban font
- The History of Typography, 5-minute video by Ben Barrett-Forrest
- Practical Typography, by Matthew Butterick
- Type Connection: “a typographic dating game”
color
- Adobe Color CC: you can explore and create color themes/palettes and easily import them into Illustrator and other Adobe products
- Paletton: great tool to see color combinations for website design; check out the “color blind” option to see how different color combos look to people with various kinds of color blindness
- Coolors.co: generate a color palette, adjust the colors, extract colors from images, and other goodies
- Pantone Color of the Year: the annual zeitgeist, rendered in color
templates
- Slides carnival Free Presentation templates: opens in Google Docs, go to File > Download to get the PPTX version
- Nancy Duarte’s book on Slidedocs
- Introducing Slidedocs and How to Design a Slidedoc, by Christine Thompson
Photoshop alternatives
- Photopea: free online photo editing program; annoying ads but the interface and tools are really similar to Photoshop; this is my first-choice PS alternative
- Pixlr: free online photo editing program
- GIMP: free, open-source, desktop program
- Affinity: does everything that Photoshop does, for just $49.99, but just for Macs
