Almost thru Nancy Duarte's book now. Take a look at her online examples of some work by ND and her firm, which raise PowerPoint to something of an art form. As with all art forms the key is restraint:
http://www.duarte.com/books/slideology/www
I found her use of the push transition to suggest panning across a larger terrain than the screen will hold at one time to be a very good use of PPT's built in functions. Conspicuously absent are animated text and logos.
The section on how to use color theory to select the signature colors of a presentation is very well done, with color wheels showing complementary, analogous, and so on combinations of colors. Another dimension is the saturation of the color, which has an effect on its visibility especially against a colored background. The fact that red-green color blindness is fairly common also has to be taken into account in planning color contrasts. ND gives the RGB color values of all the examples illustrated.
There is also a good brief intro to typography, covering the essential points (serif vs. sans-serif, how to choose point sizes, use two fonts at most - restraint again).
Grids to make the elements fall in predictable locations, dividing the screen into proportions like fourths or fifths, or even divisions based on the Fibonacci series (!), are a system ND recommends. Slides created according to a regular pattern look more pro and avoid having elements jump around from one to the next.
Very educational book, highly recommended.
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