formatting flyers and overall presentation of things

Category: Cram Session

Post 1 by dissonance (Help me, I'm stuck to my chair!) on Tuesday, 11-Sep-2012 20:38:55

For many of my resentations and things, we end up needing to present the class with handouts. I generally present outlines which works fine. But do yall have experience on how to effectively create handouts that are more visually attractive?

Post 2 by Smiling Sunshine (I've now got the bronze prolific poster award! now going for the silver award!) on Wednesday, 12-Sep-2012 10:18:00

No, but I'm Eagerly awaiting other responses as I would like to be able to create more visually appealing documents too.

Post 3 by LeoGuardian (You mean there is something outside of this room with my computer in it?) on Wednesday, 12-Sep-2012 14:08:49

Outlines and bullet points, plus very simplistic and well-spaced text, are your keys there.
Also, don't forget your cascading point sizes: headings / titles, etc.
Depending on who you are doing hand-outs for, you can often get templates for a bulletin or hand-out for the type of organization you're involved with.
But again, bullet points and an outline are your friend.
The so-called visual nature has more to do with the lack of reading comprehension and attention span of modern Americans than anything else. My wife has a newspaper from her birth year: 1966.
It is shockingly visually unappealing by many modern standards: People write in complete sentences, the spacing is rather crowded, there aren't a lot of cascading fonts and point sizes. Even when it comes to sections that you might expect, it came up empty: there was no World section, Local section, etc. They just crowded as many articles (text) into the space as they could. In modern terms, people would assume that was made by a blind person.
In terms of pics? That gets difficult, and there are a surprising amount of handouts that don't have them.
This can at least get you started.

Post 4 by dissonance (Help me, I'm stuck to my chair!) on Wednesday, 12-Sep-2012 15:24:46

thanks for the advice. i'll definitely continue to stick to bullet points and outlines for now.