1. Mutimedia Screen Design
template credit
freegoogleslidestemplates.com
arranged by
Jesse Peters
Hello! This presentation will familiarize you with best practices on screen design principles for multimedia productions.

2. Multimedia Screen Design
Three Key Components
Typography
Screen Design
Media
There are many aspects of multimedia design, but we are going to focus on three important features: Typography or Font Choices, Screen Design / Layout, and Media Use. It is important to pay attention to these features because your audience will be more engaged with your material if it is aesthetically pleasing.

3. Font & Slide Text
Typefaces need to be clear and easily read. The best choices include Helvetica, Arial, Calibri, and Verdana. 1
Use short text lines. No more than twelve. Readers can get lost with long lines. 2 3
The use of bolding, underlining, italicizing, and highlighting can be useful to your readers.
There are a wide variety of fonts you can choose from when creating a multimedia project. However, you should try to stick with a handful that are easy to read and look appealing to the eye. This slide is typed in Veranda, but there are others you can choose from. I recommend Helvetica, Arial, Calibri, and Veranda. While having a clean font to read is nice, the text itself needs to be planned well. You should avoid running lines of text clear across the page of a slide because its challenging for viewers to scan that great of a distance. Try to keep your lines no longer than twelve words across. If you need to call something out on the page you can always bold, underline, italicize, or highlight it. That helps signify importance. Finally, your font size should never go lower than 18pt.

4. Font & Slide Text
Typefaces need to be clear and easily read. The best choices include Helvetica, Arial, Calibri, and Verdana.
Use short text lines. No more than twelve. Readers can get lost with long lines.
The use of bolding, underlining, italicizing, and highlighting can be useful to your readers.
Some might say that the fonts here are pretty, but they sure are not easy to read.

5. Screen Design Information Presented Grouping Information
The amount of information on a page matters. Too much and it becomes distracting.
Information Presented
Showing what information goes together. A visual marker to identify what information belongs together.
Grouping Information
Keeping groups of information displayed in clear sections or page divisions. Includes spacing between sections and white space.
Organization & Layout
The way you decide to organize information on your screen also matters. The standard layout templates that are provided by Microsoft PowerPoint are probably your best bet, but there are some helpful screen design principles you should always follow. First, don’t fill slides with paragraphs of text, save that for your speaker notes (like this). The rule of thumb is to only put the most important information on the screen and you don’t even need full sentences. Again, save that for your speaker notes. Its better to have more slides than more information on each slide. Have you ever watched an Apple presentation? They do a good job of this.
Grouping information is always a good idea. For starters, you should always have a title for your slide, unless you want to simply show a visual. Subheadings are sometimes a god idea as well. You can see that I have provided subheadings on this slide to highlight the three main ideas about Screen Design. Additionally, I have all of my textual information listed on the right hand side of the page and have spaced it out equally. I have intentionally left areas of the screen open called white space. White space create an open feeling and makes the screen more appealing overall. The background does not have to be white, the idea if more about having adequate spacing on your page.

6. Color Choice & Theme Color Pattern Theme
Select colors that look pleasant and complemen each other. Repeat them.
Color Pattern
The overall look of your presentation should feel the same.
Theme
Color choice matters! You don’t want to pick colors that are harsh or that take attention away from the content of your presentation. Stick with simple colors and use those colors throughout your entire presentation. You might think that repetition is a bad thing, but our brains like repetition. The video on this page might be about painting a room, but the concept of colors applies in any setting.

7. How not to present your text
Typography
How not to present your text
This font is far too small and challenging to read. It is also just clumped together in one long stream of words. I could change the topic to last nights baseball game and the user wouldn’t know because they have more than likely left the site the second they saw the font. When you squeeze a bunch of tiny text together in one area it does not catch the eye’s attention, but actually distracts it. If someone wanted to read a novel they would pick up a book and do just that. THe text in a digital setting needs to be clear, to the point, and easy to read. This has been painful for me to type.
This is an example of what not to do. I know, this is outrageous, but you get the idea. Make sure your font is clear and big enough to be read with ease. Try to avoid bright colors, especially on fonts. As you can see its challenging to read the font, but in yellow its almost painful.

8. Poor Screen Design
You don’t want to distract the reader from the important information.
This is a text box that has no clear organizational structure. It is too long and appears to be random. The red box to the left does not fit the overall color theme and is simply distracting. The heading is too large and obnoxious.
There is just too much happening on this slide. You might call it “busy”. You need to make sure your audience or viewers are not spending their time trying to figure out what to go to next.
Here is another example of poor multimedia design. I want to take a minute and explain why this is not designed well. First, the heading is in a font that is not clean and simple. While it can be read it is not very professional. Next, the colored text boxes are distracting and not grouped together. Additionally, the text in the text boxes does not align with the heading. The images placed on this slide all convey the same idea, but what might be the problem with them. Well first, they are all from different art themes. Second, why would I need three images of the same thing on the slide? Finally, this slide breaks the ideas of screen design. Nothing is grouped and there is no apparent organizational pattern.

9. Multimedia Screen Design
All of the pieces must come together.
Typography
Screen Design
Media
White Space
Color Pattern
Implement additional ways to convey the information
Typeface, Size, Length.
It must be neat and easy to follow
Make the pages look clean and pleasing to the eyes
Maintain a constant color theme
If you follow these basic ideas about screen design your presentation will come across better to your audience. Font choice, organization, image selection, and color usage must all work together to make your presentation more appealing. In the end, the best piece of advise I can give you is to keep your design as simple as possible. You can’t go wrong with simple, but you can go very wrong with complicated. I hope this short presentation with helpful in your future multimedia design attempts!