Leave “air” around all elements
Each text or visual element present on the slide needs a good amount of free space around itself to be readable and to convey an impression of order and clarity.
Leave a proper margin all around the slide
When visual or text elements get too close to the side margins, the overall impression of the slide will be one of overcrowded, unbalanced and too tightly fitting a layout.
Frames and boxes inside slides
Boxes and framing
The general trend or habit of framing or boxing information on a slide does not offer good reasons to be sustained. The slides already “frame” the content in a very marked way. Further boxing of the content inside a presentation can only lower the data-to-ink ratio and therefore decrease the readability, clarity, comprehension and elegance of the data presented.
Framing or boxing should be used only when the requirement is mandated by the need to actually separate or categorize a specific content section as different or “independent” from the main content presented in the same slide/screen. Much in the same way this gets done in magazine articles, or manuals, when a specific focus on an issue is carried in a boxed article within a larger one.
In many cases where there is an effective need for the framing or boxing approach, the visual damage can be limited by augmenting the “Smallest effective difference” approach applied to this, as well as in specifically limiting the boxing only to the latitudinal or longitudinal aspect of the data.
