Inspired By Design
Inspired by Design is a long-running Presentation Guild webinar series built around the belief that learning happens when you show up, engage, reflect, and apply what you discover. Each episode is designed as a focused learning experience, turning everyday presentation challenges into practical insights and techniques you can immediately put to work. The series supports a two-way learning journey, where observation, experimentation, and shared experience strengthen both individual skills and the collective standards of our profession.
Across 36 episodes, Inspired by Design explores the foundations and finer points of presentation design and data visualization. Topics include core design principles such as contrast, alignment, hierarchy, repetition, and white space; effective use of typography, color, icons, images, and grids; and practical PowerPoint techniques like custom layouts, chart templates, vectors, drawing tools, and working with fonts across platforms. The series also takes a deep dive into data visualization, covering chart clarity, labeling, color use, alternatives to common chart types, and strategies for simplifying complex data.
The Inspired by Design series is created and presented by Julie Terberg (Terberg Design LLC) and Nolan Haims (Nolan Haims Creative).
Inspired by Design #36: Design Principles for Presentations - Repetition
Inspired by Design #36: Repetition in presentation design isn’t about making every slide identical—it’s about repeating core visual choices (grid, type, color, shapes, imagery) so the whole deck feels cohesive instead of like a Franken-deck.
Inspired by Design #35: Data Visualization - Direct Chart Labels
Inspired by Design #35: Direct labels, callouts, and annotations turn charts from puzzles into instant stories by putting all the meaning right where the data lives.
Inspired by Design #34: Design Principles for Presentations - Alignment
Inspired by Design #34: Alignment is the invisible structure that organizes everything on your slides, guiding your audience’s eye and making content easier to read, scan, and understand.
Inspired by Design #33: Data Visualization - Chart junk
Inspired by Design #33: Chart junk is all the nonessential “noise” in a chart that gets between your audience and the data—and your job is to strip it away so the story is instantly clear.
Inspired by Design #32: Design Principles for Presentations - Hierarchy
Inspired by Design #32: Visual hierarchy tells your audience where to look first, second, and third—turning a slide from a flat list of items into a guided experience.
Inspired by Design #31: Data Visualization - Alternatives to Clustered Column Charts
Inspired by Design #31: Clustered column charts often turn into unreadable “data skylines,” and there are far clearer, more presentation-friendly charts you can use instead.
Inspired by Design #30: Principles for Presentations - Contrast
Inspired by Design #30 Strong contrast is one of the most powerful tools in presentation design—it tells your audience what to look at first and makes your message clearer, bolder, and easier to remember.
Inspired by Design #29: Data Visualization - Alternatives for Pie Charts
Inspired by Design 29: Just because your data adds up to 100% doesn’t mean you need a pie chart—bar charts, doughnuts, waffles, treemaps, and line charts usually tell the story faster and more clearly.
Inspired by Design #28: Drawing with ink
Inspired by Design #28: PowerPoint’s ink tools let you sketch, highlight, and even animate hand-drawn elements, turning ordinary slides into custom, human, “drawn-by-you” visuals—without leaving PowerPoint.
Inspired by Design #27: Data Visualization - Making Manual Charts
Inspired by Design #28: Sometimes the best way to visualize data in PowerPoint is to skip the chart engine entirely and build “manual charts” with shapes for more control, clarity, and creativity.
Inspired by Design #26: Using Typography - Tips Part 2
Inspired by Design #26: Good typography in presentations is all about readability: from font size and number styles to bullets, symbols, and spacing, every tiny choice either helps your audience read—or makes them work too hard.
Inspired by Design #25: Data visualization - Chart Placeholders and Templates
Inspired by Design #25: Once you’ve designed a great-looking chart, PowerPoint’s chart placeholders and templates let you reuse that design fast and consistently across whole decks—without reformatting from scratch every time.