PreparedSlide system, 2026
Trials Throughout History IX*
*Renamed history-of-trials course
A faculty deck, redesigned
A judge sent me the deck for his full-day course on the Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg. It was 161 slides: a bold title, a rule under it, then bullets. Working from his slides, I rebuilt the deck on a single visual system and prepared review packets for the judge.
The problem
Bulleted slides are fine for ten minutes. This course runs all day, on material where the room has to keep paying attention through the worst of it, and by the third hour every slide looks like the one before it. The judge's words were doing all the work and getting no help.
How the design got there
We talked about artistic direction before he sent me his slides. He told me to take as much freedom as I wanted: the year before, another program manager had used railroad tracks as a motif for a day on the Underground Railroad, and he liked how that had worked. So I pitched the color scheme first, then a war map, a rolled-out map with pins in the strategic locations, each pin a part of the day, then an overhead layout of the courtroom at Nuremberg. He turned all of it down.
I didn't see why until I read his actual slides. The day wasn't about a place. It was about the oath, and the way it shifts: duty to man, then duty to self, then duty to country, which is how the Nazis justified what they were doing. I pitched the design around that shift and he approved it. Getting there took about three rounds.
The slides had to be dark. The day was going to be recorded and broadcast, and AV told me that on light slides he'd look like a see-through grandpa, so we settled on a dark burgundy that he approved. After that it stayed collaborative: he liked the direction, then he wanted it simpler, so I went simpler, then he wanted more color back.
The coordinating judge, while we were building it
“You know, you come up with good ideas, and actually, I’m already liking a lot of what you’ve done here.”
The course coordinator, a planning call, July 2026What he owned and what I owned
He owned the history, the law and the language. I owned where it sat: what goes large, what the eye finds first, where the reader gets to rest. When I found a typo, a stray dash or a numbering mismatch in his text, I didn't fix it. I called it to his attention when I sent the drafts, because if I corrected a judge's sentence without asking, I'd be teaching something he didn't say.
The title
The deck opens on a frame, tracked capitals and a bronze numeral, and closes on the same. I set the date and the imprint line in place of a footer so the first slide reads as a title page and not as slide one of many.
The part opener
Section breaks go full bleed: an outlined numeral, the part title dropped to the base line, and an illustrative interior behind it. The interior is a generated image, not an archival photograph, and it is credited that way in the deck.
A line is crossed
The four stages step down and to the right, numeral by numeral, so the scale sits in the words instead of in a chart.
Testimony
The faculty slide set the photograph in a small bordered box beside the bullets. Here it carries its own half of the slide and fades into the ground at one edge, with the account beside it and the source under it. Every image in the deck sits in a register of 32 entries, each with its source and its permission status tracked separately from the design work.
The Nuremberg Code
A list of ten conditions becomes a hierarchy. Consent stands alone at the top, the only condition in red, and the other nine sit in a three-column register under it.
The verdict
Red appears almost nowhere in this deck. It marks the camps on the stage descent, the first condition of the Nuremberg Code, and this number. Holding it back for three slides is what gives the seven its weight.
Cut at faculty review
The mockups that went to him for review carried a throughline: a line at the foot of the slides naming where the physician's duty stood at that point in the day, with the duty it replaced struck through. It ran from duty to the patient, to duty to society and race, to duty owed to the state, and in the last part it came back to the revised oath of 1948: "The health of my patient will be my first consideration." He approved it, then asked me to take it out, along with the commentary I'd set under his text and the references on the title page. I took it out of every slide and kept the visual direction he liked.
The three drafts as they went to him, review banner and all. None of these lines is on the final slides.
The palette
- GarnetTitle and openers
- WineTeaching slides
- VerdictThe verdict
- CreamText
- Soft creamItalic leads
- BronzeNumerals, rules, footer
- DuskRow and column rules
- RedPeak numerals
- Oath redThe duty line, cut at review
The rules behind it
- Body type never goes under 27 pixels. If a slide won't hold its text at that size it becomes two slides. Shrinking the type was not available.
- No slide is a plain list. Lines of faculty text stacked with gaps read as teaching notes. Every slide gets real structure: numerals, columns, a pulled line, grouped stanzas or an image plate.
- Crop is lawful, paint is not. I'll crop a faculty image to fit a plate, and I'll let it fade at an edge into the ground. I won't tint it or draw over it.
- No orphaned words. A title breaks where the phrase breaks, written into the slide, so it never depends on where the column happens to end.
- Nothing author-facing renders on a slide. Production notes, flags and open image questions live in the handoff list.
What it came to
The master file runs 168 slides: his 161, plus the agenda, the lunch questions, the breaks, and the continuation slides where one had to split to hold the type floor. Mockups went to him for review as the build went on, and I kept his rulings in the build file. The six pairs above are a selection made to show the design.