Anyone who experienced giving a speech or presenting a project to an audience knows that it can be rather stressful. With all the eyes on you, you can easily forget some words, mess up your slideshow, start speaking with a really quiet voice, and all because of the discomfort of being in the center of everyone’s attention. However, if you are sure that your presentation design is outstanding, none of these things will be a problem. Indeed, a modern PowerPoint design can add confidence and make your presentation a lot more effective. How to achieve it?
Try Your Best from the Very Beginning
The beginning of your presentation is everything: you either grab everyone’s attention and make them want to see more, or you sound boring and mediocre and nobody will listen on. The graphic design of your presentation starts with the first slide, so make sure it sets the right mood for the viewers. Clearly, it takes some experience and knowledge to be able to choose the best presentation design, and if you do not have any of those, you are virtually doomed to fail your public speech. That is unless you have the time and will to learn and try your best to prepare a great material. In such case, our PowerPoint presentation design tips can prove rather helpful for you.
Why Bother at All?
It may seem that choosing good PowerPoint fonts and images is not that big a deal as compared to writing appropriate content. However, the visual material should never be underestimated, as it often has more power than you think, and here is why:
- The presentation distracts from listening to the speaker, which allows you to feel freer and less stress;
- The visual presentation completes the provided information and adds stimulation for the audience;
- Creative and authentic PPT can form everyone’s opinion about you, even if your verbal presentation is not that impressive.
Powerpoint Design Tips
As you can see, it is worth bothering to design a presentation if you want to really get the message across to the viewers. Below are some suggestions on how to do it right.
- Elaborate the First Slide
- Be Picky about the Font
- Be Selective
- One Idea per Slide
- Be Original
- Use a Limited Palette
- Six Lines Tops
- No Bullet Points
- Use Proper Font Sizes
- Work on the Closure
- Post It Online
The first impression is decisive in everything, and it works with PPT slides as well. Your title slide will determine the whole presentation’s success, so try to make it appealing and engaging.
Despite all the choices of elaborate fonts available today, you should remember that the best font for presentations is the one that is easy to read at the back rows. Consider using simple and distinctive letters for your presentation, and it will be enough.
Make sure that everything you include in your presentation is meaningful and educational; otherwise, why would you put it on your slides? The content should be well-written in the first place, and then well-presented.
As a presentation designer, you should avoid placing too much information on your slides. Do not overwhelm the viewers with numerous theses and narrow it down to one argument per slide.
PowerPoint offers a lot of templates to choose from, but none of them will work if you want to impress the audience. Create your own, unique presentation with its original style.
The widespread mistake of all the beginners is using too many colors in their PPT. This can make the presentation chaotic and distract the audience from the content. Thus, you should stick to a limited palette of harmonious colors that match and complete each other.
It is impossible to keep the viewers focused if there is too much text, so less is more when it comes to your PPT presentation. Make sure to have a maximum of six lines per slide.
All the bullet point lists are completely outdated and they are never effective. If you want to make your viewers memorize the information, invent the new ways of listing your ideas.
Try to imagine how your presentation will look on a bigger scale as opposed to your laptop’s screen. Doing that will help you to use suitable font sizes for each slide.
The final slide is what the viewers will remember of your presentation, so make sure to include some inspiring and encouraging message in it. Close your PPT with a slide that you would like to be associated with.
You can use the various services such as SlideShare to make your presentation accessible to a greater number of users. Why hide the result of your hard work from the world? At SlideShare, you can do the following:
1. Describe your PPT in short
2. Choose whom to share it with
3. Put hashtags so that others could find it
Learn It Well
Even the strongest visual presentation design can be ineffective and unimpressive if you voice it wrong. Make sure to learn the material and rehearse at home. Pay a special attention to intonation and stresses, as they help to underline the important information.
Creating presentations is never a simple task, but sooner or later everyone has to face it. We hope that our PowerPoint design tips helped assisted you with it.