> Does anyone have pointers on how make your slides look
  > beautiful without being a trained designer?

By keeping it simple. Pick one good font. As little text as possible. No templates[1]. Solid image material (sufficient resolution, used sparingly, do not overcrowd the slide with superfluous visuals). Without much work, you've outdone 90% of your competition.

[1] By that I mean: No fancy pre-made visual templates. For the sake of consistency, using the templating mechanism of your chosen tool (Keynote, PowerPoint, Beamer[2]) is highly recommended. But you'll have to create your own templates.

[2] Don't use Beamer.

I'd suggest getting to one good slide. One slide with a beautiful font, one line of text and a complementary background image/color. This template is already 90% the work of making the presentation aesthetically pleasing. And take it from there.

What is the problem with beamer?

I think Beamer is great for things like lecture slides and other presentation where the aim is to pass on dense amounts of information. When using slides to illustrate rather than summarise, however, it requires a series of hacks to position, resize, add custom colours and images or fonts. It also gives you standard elements that you probably don't want in these illustrative slides, such as the slide number, author and subtitle on the footer of each slide.

Hmm.... I'm not sure I understand this thread, then. Do you view the predominant advice of this article as really only relevant for somewhat "informal" talks? Because, pretty much every presentation I've ever had to give was fairly dense in information.

(Also, I think if you are just doing an image for the whole slide, that isn't too tough in beamer. Just switch to the default theme and don't provide a title for the slide. Right?)

I think beautiful slides can be made with minimal effort when adhering to the points in the article and using a simple black text on white background approach. Increasing the font size to an absurd can make things look funky and seems to be a trend, as well as having slides with a single powerful word or two.

www.noteandpoint.com is a good source for inspiration -- whenever I find myself in a situation where I need to produce a presentation quickly but want to make it look good, I just go through these. My most recent favourite is this one -- http://noteandpoint.com/2010/02/keeping-it-personal/ Goes to show how much you can do with a simple bold serif font. It's also worth looking at this one http://noteandpoint.com/2011/11/how-to-create-slides-that-ro... -- How to create slides that rock, learning by example :)