Reposted Make better documents. – Anil Dash by .
A really common anti-pattern that I often see is needless inconsistencies. For example, people will vary the size, color or emphasis of titles across different slides in a presentation. Sometimes, this is an artifact of their creation — slides with this font came from this team that was working together, but slides with this other font were copied from some older presentation. But to the audience, the immediate message that they’ll take away from a difference in formatting on the title of a slide is, “There must be a reason this changed, let me understand its significance.” Suddenly, your audience is trying to deduce the semantic meaning of a change that you didn’t even make on purpose.
Lots of great pointers to improve your next document in this post from Anil Dash. The quoted part is a particular pet peeve of mine. Keep this article open the next time you’re making a document. If you can check off most points, it’ll give off a great impression.