The Art Of Well Designed Powerpoint Presentation
How many boring PowerPoint presentation have you been forced to sit through? I bet you need more than two hands to count them! A great presentation will draw your audience and make them really engaged in what your are saying (and maybe selling) but a poor presentation will immediately put them off and they will ignore your message. In this article Paul Campbell gives you some simple tips on how not to suck at presentations.
Word and Excel are two of the most commonly used features on any Windows package with PowerPoint only ever referred to on occasion. Even in-house designers produce much of their work on Adobe InDesign or Illustrator which means experienced and skilled pitch deck designers can be few and far between.
The knock-on effect is that substandard presentations are created containing too much information or unhelpful bullet points that offer nothing to the audience. This makes it difficult for the presenter to do a good job and usually leads to a bad experience for those who are probably sitting through one of many presentations that day.
If you opt not to use an infographic design agency or a professional PowerPoint company for the design element you must have a clear idea of how you want the audience to respond so it can be structured accordingly. Consider ways in which you can make it stand out while also ensuring the delivery puts you centre stage rather than the presentation itself.
As an experienced London design agency we are often asked what other PowerPoint features can help improve in-house presentation designs, some of which we going into more detail below:
Image and text clarity
Two of the most important aspects of any presentation design involves making sure the audience can clearly see the images and the text, while understanding the correlation between the two. Using big, bold imagery keeps the room engaged by allowing everyone to see what’s on the screen.
Similarly, using washed out backgrounds, be it in colour blocks or over related imagery, looks visually interesting, avoids distractions and puts the text into focus so it can be easily digested. This is something that most beginners can do quickly and easily and will instantly make a huge difference to the quality of the presentation. If working to an extremely tight budget and unable to hire an infographic design agency then this is a great starting point.
Inserting video
Attention spans are shorter than ever today and presenters face a tougher job than ever in keeping the full interest of their audience. Stock photos, graphs and other still imagery all work perfectly well but using video can take the presentation to the next level. Put simply, video content is on the rise everywhere you look because people often find it easier to retain the information it delivers.
There are a number of different ways pitch deck designers can integrate video into the layout. Going full screen keeps the audience fully focused. Alternatively, you can use a number of helpful PowerPoint features such as tiling, shadows, frames, reflections, bevels and more to add a unique finishing touch to create a powerful PowerPoint company presentation.
Morphing effects
This is a little trickier to master and will take a lot more time and practice to learn but it can add something really special to any presentation. What this tool enables pick deck designers to do is create motion, essentially morphing the objects on one slide into the contents of another.
Rather than changing the colour, rotating, moving or resizing an object individually, morphing allows you to do all of this at once if required. These effects won’t be needed for every presentation but they offer a wonderful range of options for anyone who wants to progress to a more advanced level.
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