Office Depot transforms basic PowerPoint into new professional look

Before: The original opening slide had big logos, big photos, and big text. However, the slide’s graphic elements competed with each other for attention.

After: We chose one stock photo from Photodisc to replace the four images on the original slide. The logo’s proportions are adjusted and centered. And the text, though smaller, becomes a focal point.

Before: Straightforward but hardly inspirational, this flow chart plainly explains Office Depot’s vendor-selection process.

With a nationwide network of megastores, Office Depot has transformed the way America shops for office supplies. The Delray Beach, Fla-based retailer recently needed a transformation of its own, particularly for its Supplier Diversity slide show. In early 2004, the company came to The Presentation Team looking to update this 10-slide Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.

The original design was bland and cluttered with content, which detracted from the company’s message. And because of the small number of slides, company presenters were creeping along at a pace of nearly one page every four minutes.

We set out on a mission to overhaul the sideshow by designing with more white space, replacing boxy JPG images with transparent PNG graphics, and improving audience attentiveness by increasing the presentation’s pacing.

We began the full redesign by creating a new slide template using Adobe Photoshop. In a departure from the conventional use of light text on a dark background, we opted for the cleaner look of dark text against a white background. We created a beige banner with muted images of diverse people for the title bar and ran a narrow gay bar across the slide’s bottom for balance.

Several slides featured complex bullet points with complex concepts. To help the presenter more effectively communicate these ideas, we expanded these bullet points onto separate slides. The presentation increased to 18 slides total.

We returned to Photoshop to work on the graphics. We chose updated images from Photodisc, resizing them and using channel masks for highlighting as needed. We saved the edited images as PNG files and imported them into PowerPoint.

Finally, we replaced the original fly-in graphics with graceful wipe and fade effects. The result was a clean and updated presentation that captured the excitement of the sales force and viewers.