Use CARP So You Don't Present CRAP

Nobody wants to work hard on developing a webinar or educational intervention only to design crappy visuals and slides that turns the audience off. That's why we should use CARP to avoid presenting crap. CARP is an important graphic design principle that ensures clear visuals that will not only keep your audience engaged, but will also present your information in a clear, organized, easy-on-the-eye manner.

CARP stands for the following:

• C = Contrast

• A = Alignment

• R = Repetition

• P = Proximity

I found an excellent visual example of CARP principles here.

This slide shows a lack of CARP elements and contains too much text that the eye cannot easily digest. Your audience will look at this and immediately turn away by the amount of text and lack of contrast, alignment, repetition and proximity:

With a little editing, however, the slide is now ready for an audience to engage with it better:

CARP is a new design concept for me, but I like to think that as an artistic and visually-oriented person it comes naturally. The value of CARP principles is to engage and teach your audience with a well-designed slide. All four principles are important and work together in design, however if I had to chose just one to focus on, I would chose contrast. Contrast includes the font size, font color, font style, background color and how the background and font colors work together (or against each other).

Color of text can make or break a presentation; we've all seen obnoxious, jarring presentations when it comes to font and color, right? This example shows a slide with too many colors, lack of contrast, and way too many words on a slide.

And don't even get me started on the sins of background choice on this slide:

 Speaking of font, let's stick with the classics. This 10 Commandments of Typography is a very helpful visual guide about fonts, colors, and contrasts to keep in mind when designing a presentation:

Let's hope I can put these CARP principles to use when I start designing my upcoming webinar!