Those who work with me, know that I’m a HUGE Nancy Duarte fan.  Her book slide:ology is one of my favorites, as is her TED talk where she determines the structure for inspirational talks.

Now it seems that her firm is at it again with a library of templates, that they’re calling the Diagrammer.  Each template is 99 cents each, which can be a bit steep if you’re going to download a lot of templates.  BUT it’s a fantastic solution for when you are in a pinch and really template that doesn’t look like Smart Art.

I decided to try one of the templates out to see how it worked.  I downloaded Flow_Merge_and_Divide_683.

On the upside, they’re easy to download.  When you download one of the templates, it comes for the lowest common denominator of PowerPoint:  2003.  The templates come with a set color scheme already, but you can customize them for your own needs (color, sizing, etc).  However, there are some shading layers on some of the elements, so you’ll want to ungroup items and play with the various gradients individually.

On the downside, they’re not easy to graphically edit.  I played with it a bit to see if the color scheme would automatically update with the template master, but alas, it doesn’t.  So, you will have to update those colors yourself, which can be a pain for those of us that aren’t as advanced in their PowerPoint usage.  Fonts will have to be manually updated as well.

As a bonus, though, you get to see what the Duarte basic template is, which is kind of fun.  As I would have predicted, they use Helvetica Neue, the font that Arial is based off of.

Templates are easy to find, especially if you’ve read slide:0logy, since the organization of the site follows that taxonomy.  You can learn about the taxonomy through their fun video, as well!