No matter what the content is for a presentation, our mind tends to wonder off easily without the use of contrasting elements. If people lose interest in looking at your work, they will move on and look for other things.
We are bombarded with an incredible amount of information everyday. Very often, we need to go through thousands of graphics and texts before we can arrive at what we really want. It is important that designers must make sure that they do not confuse or bore the readers in what they are presenting. Entertaining the reader with the right visuals, space, and sounds is very important in creating an effective presentation.
The challenge here is to make sure that contrasting elements are uplifting rather than annoying. The user's mind should be intrigued, not confused. Dynamic tension creates contrast and there are alot of ways of doing that. Some of the common ways are listed below:
Type: One way is to simply increase the font size and bold the titles or sub-titles while using a standard smaller font size for the body text. Italics could be used to stress certain important sentences.
Color: Another element that could be contrasted is color. You could use complementary colors, put colored images or black and white images, use hand-drawn illustrations, play around with shadows, 3D effects, or use positive and negative space. Negative space let the eye rest and makes your content stand out. Using red or strong coloured text on white background tends to make the text stand out strongly.
Shapes: Different shapes and lines can also draw attention. Shapes when aligned at a certain angle or spaced in a certain way forces the eye to look at it immediately. We see naturalistic or geometric shapes everyday and we like to associate that experience with any document we are reading. Especially when combined with colours or images, shapes can create a strong visual impact on the reader.
Movement and Sound: Movement attracts attention. If the document is static and you embed an animated gifs or flash animation, people will be drawn to the animation easily. Sound wakes a person up. Sound makes an animation more realisitc and can change the mood of the viewer. Adding an multimedia element is an effective way to convey the message quickly but the downside is that people might get annoyed if you overuse it.
In conclusion, contrast in any document(web or print) is very important. All important messages in the document should be highlighted in a special way so as to capture attention. An effective presentation is in which the user need not go through alot of text to find what he wants.
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