6 tips for your next eye-catching presentation from professional PowerPoint designers
We look at presentations of professional PowerPoint designers and wonder, can we do the same? Some might think it’s just about putting information on the slides. However, when one tackles to actually design them, they encounter obstacles and late deadlines.
A well-made presentation can help to reach your goals: convince investors, sell your product, teach students or deliver a phenomenal speech in front of a large audience. Use these tips of presentation experts to reach your objectives.
Tip 1. Content is king.
A lot of people start designing slides with opening PowerPoint and inserting text, pictures that they think they definitely need in their presentation. Although, it’s a fundamentally wrong approach. Just imagine starting to build a house by choosing the colors of the wallpaper. As with building the house, you need to start with the foundation. And in case of presentation design, it is content.
One of the favorite tools of presentation experts is a storyboard. You can use it to think about slides in advance. It was actively used by Walt Disney: the animators of his studio manually drew the key points of the cartoon for approval by the whole team. If you use storyboards, you will also be able to come up with non-trivial visualizations of your ideas.
Storyboard made by a presentation design agency Reprezent
Tip 2. Less is better.
If you are not a professional PowerPoint designer and don’t practice on a daily basis, you should aim at simple and clean design. Things you can do:
- Use 1 idea per slide. This will help you avoid putting too much information on the slides, and it will be easier for the viewer to follow the logic in the speech.
- Go easy on colors. Choose 2-3 primary colors instead of using the entire palette. A solid background for text often looks more dignified than a photo that doesn’t fit the content.
- Choose 2 fonts: one for the body text and one for the headings.
Tip 3. Align objects to achieve a neat picture.
How can you tell a presentation made by a presentation design company and an amateur? Look at the alignment of the objects.
Objects on a slide, icons, and text boxes can be manipulated using the Align and Distribute functions. This will make your presentation tidier and also simplify your work because one feature in PowerPoint replaces long attempts to place objects at equal distances from each other.
In PowerPoint, a lot of text on slides is best aligned to the left. Don’t use center justification. This creates uneven spaces between words and makes it harder to read the text.
Tip 4. Use design features in PowerPoint
You don’t need to be a professional PowerPoint designer to make slides that look excellent and like you paid a fortune for. There are many features in PowerPoint that allow creating polished slides.
- Remove background feature.
An easy way to make an object pop on the screen. All you need to do is insert a photo and use the Remove background feature. No Photoshop needed.
Presentation made for a perfume company by presentation design agency Reprezent
- Designer feature.
This feature automatically creates several design options for your slide when you insert content into it. This function is especially useful when you need to create slides fast. - Built-in icons.
A lot of people don’t know but there are ready-to-use icons in your PowerPoint installed already. You can find them in the Insert Tab > Icons. There are many categories to filter icons by and you can also change the color of the icons once inserted.
Tip 5. Don’t end with “Thank you for the attention”, use Call-to-action instead.
Ending your presentation with the slide “Thank you for your attention” is outdated and meaningless. It is better to insert a call-to-action and your contacts. Immediately show what you are urging the audience to do and leave ways to get in touch with you.
Presentation made for a cleaning company by presentation design agency Reprezent
Tip 6. Get inspired
One of the secret weapons of presentation experts is that they get inspired by the works of others. It doesn’t mean stealing the ideas, simply borrowing some design decisions. It is really common to look for inspiration in art, advertisements, cinematography etc.
Look for ideas on platforms like Behance, Dribbble or Pinterest. Search for the topic you are making a presentation about. Don’t shy away from the landing pages as they serve as a great source of inspiration for slide design. You can also read blogs of presentation design companies as they definitely know what they are doing.
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