What’s that you say? You want guest presenters to speak at your webinar? And you want to make their lives more difficult, make their materials look worse, and cause them to invest extra unnecessary time in preparation so that they hate you and never want to work with you again?
Sure… you can do that! One of the easiest ways is to insist that they design slides in your proprietary format and then make it as difficult as possible to comply. Here are some fun and easy ways to ensure that nobody other than your own graphic design team can ever add their slides to your corporate template. This is spectacular entertainment when you have guest presenters who need to meet a content submission deadline for you.
- Choose a background color other than white. Now anybody who has included image snaps from web pages or stock graphics using white backgrounds will find that their nice pictures look like ugly pasted-on rectangles. Very attractive!
- Change the primary dark and light colors in the color theme to something other than black and white. Now imported text, color fills, and other basic contents that rely on defaults will look wrong and will not work with the rest of the colors on the source slides.
- Use a giant 40-point or larger font for slide titles. Now any slide with titles more than 12 characters long will wrap and flow into the content area. Beautiful!
- Position the title placeholder box far from the top of the slide. This gives you a better chance of causing their titles to overlay their slide content.
- Fill up your slide master list with three or four master sets. This adds the thrill of the hunt and makes it difficult to select which layout is the correct one to use for the imported slides.
- Put a pretty curved border image around the master background. This guards against anyone showing off by bleeding a rectangular photo image all the way to the bottom and sides of the slide.
- Add your logo to a corner of the slide master. Bonus points if it extends into the content area. Double bonus if it has been photoshopped into the full background image so there is no way to selectively remove it from a layout.
These tips should get you started. I am sure you can come up with additional ways to make your guest presenters go through extra time and effort when contributing slides to your webinars. Remember, the more work they do on your project, the more they will remember you, so don’t be shy!
