Done correctly, laying text over a picture can look great! But you need to choose an area of the picture that is neutral. Text placed over a busy picture is very hard to read, so you’ll have to come up with another solution.
Before
Problem 1
This is a very detailed picture. If you’re going to lay text over a picture, you should be putting it in am area where nothing much is happening. This text falls squarely onto the most detailed part of the picture, making it very difficult to read.
Problem 2
The designer tried to make the text more legible by making the title white and the body text red. We can just about make out the title of the slide but the red text is next to impossible to read. The problem isn’t that the text is red, it’s that the background is competing for our attention. It’s winning.
After
Solution 1
This is a beautiful picture, so I want to make sure people can see all of it, unobstructed. So I made it smaller but not so small that it’s hard to make out.
Solution 2
To give the slide a sense of being about Mali, I used a colorized image of some Malian fabric for the background. It’s light enough to provide good legibility for the type.
Solution 3
I moved the type off the image so you can read it. For “Sundiata Keita,” I used the eyedropper tool to pull a color out of the image.
[button link=”https://www.lauramfoley.com/gallery-2/” color=”orange” target=”_self” size=”small” title=”Back to Gallery”]Back to Gallery[/button]
[divider style=”shadow”]
Submit your own slide for a Makeover!
If you subscribe to the Cheating Death by PowerPoint newsletter you can receive a free Slide makeover! Here’s the deal: In exchange for permission to use your slide in the newsletter and on this website for promotional purposes, you’ll get the redesigned PowerPoint slide file to use in any way you like. So not only do you get access to a step-by-step video on how the slide was redesigned and the source file, you learn the reasons behind all of the changes!
You’ll also get a free eBook, Cheating Death by PowerPoint: Essential PowerPoint Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices, which includes loads of advice on how to improve the way you work with PowerPoint!
[button link=”https://list.robly.com/subscribe?a=c4115aa351a8e513f6e3b7af8ffaf943″ color=”default” target=”_blank” size=”small”]Subscribe to the Cheating Death by PowerPoint newsletter[/button]
[divider style=”shadow”]
[button link=”#top” color=”gray” target=”_self” size=”small” title=”Back to top”]Back to top[/button]