Dr. Ed Bailey's Web Site: Blueprint

This image is from one of Dr. Bailey's books: The Practical Writer (7th edition)

Blueprint

In the model, the blueprint slide is the fourth one—the last one in your introduction. The earlier slides clearly established WHAT you're going to talk about and WHY you're going to talk about it.

The blueprint slide establishes HOW you're going to talk about it.

What is a blueprint slide?

The blueprint slide simply names the parts of the body of your presentation. Here's an example:

Sample good blueprint slide

Tips for a blueprint slide

A blueprint slide:

Should have a clearly different design from your body slides. You'll be repeating this slide throughout the body of your presentation—it should be instantly recognizable.
Should not include the same title element as the body slides (to further differentiate the blueprint slide from the body slides).
Should, however, share some design features with the cover and body slides (so it seems part of the same family of design).
Should not have a very long list. In other words, your presentation shouldn't have too many parts—or your audience may well get lost. Try not to have more than five parts. You may have to do some combining to achieve this.

Where does the blueprint slide fit into the presentation?

Here you can see how the blueprint slide (at the bottom) fits in with the other slides in the introduction:

Sample introduction -- blueprint slide comes at end

Notice that all of these slides share design features. And notice that the blueprint slide is the last slide in your introduction. That's because it names the parts of the body of your presentation. So after the blueprint slide, what's next? The body of your presentation.

Other examples

There are countless ways to make blueprint slides. The following examples show you some variety. Here's the blueprint slide for the presentation on Yellowstone:

Sample good blueprint slide

Or for a more informal tone on the Yellowstone presentation, you could use either one of these:

Alternative design for a blueprint slide

And here's the blueprint slide for the golf presentation:

Sample good blueprint slide for golf presentation

A quiz

What's wrong with this blueprint slide?

Quiz: What's wrong with this blueprint slide?

See if you can find one thing wrong.

Ready to see the answer?

Through with the quiz? You're ready to move on to . . .

Your next step

The next slide in the model is the moving blueprint slide.