This tweet by a highly competent designer flashed by:

It is work in progress on a presentation. You see what direction he is taking: the big headline on the left, rather than across the slide, and a paragraph of very small text.

I think this might be a format that many presentations will use:

  • More and more display devices are now wide screen (which is a great format for movies)
  • Headlines that stretch all across very wide screens are unreadable.
  • The best visual compositions / layouts are not very wide ones
  • Increasingly, we use presentations to send beforehand, without actual presenting/verbal explanation, hence the need for explanatory text

In my presentation app SlideMagic, I stuck to the 4:3 aspect ratio for slides, enabling you to put the headline across the slide, and added an optional slide out panel for plain text that turns the 4:3 composition into a 16:9 one.

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