Presentations are a difficult, yet essential, part of any business. Who hasn’t sat through an important presentation and had trouble staying focused because it was so boring or so bad that you would rather be anywhere else?
The good news is that presentations don’t have to be such a rough part of meetings anymore. There are plenty of supplies and presentation ideas that should make every presentation more informative and better looking. If you are tasked with designing a Powerpoint or other type of presentation, there are ways you can keep everyone’s attention and make them actually feel good about sitting through it. Here are a few design tips that help you design pretty yet professional presentations every time.
Don’t Use Stock Templates
Usually, the first thing anybody does when they sit down to design a presentation with software like Powerpoint or Keynote is to open the template options and browse them until they find one they like. Sure, this is an easy way to get going, but it’s boring: everyone has already seen all of those templates. Instead, try building one from scratch.
All presentation software has blank templates that allow you to design your own. This is nice because you can then use your own judgment and match the style of the presentation to fit the material you will be presenting.
This isn’t as daunting of a task as it sounds. You can even borrow ideas from presentations you’ve seen in the past or templates you’ve used before. There is nothing wrong with using what you’ve liked in the past, as long as it was professional and effective. Just make sure that all of the slides have a coherent design that flows well from one to the other. Also, use rectangles to single out important pieces of information so you can easily draw your audience’s attention to them.
Here are some great examples to get you started.
Make Your Handouts Standout
Most presentations are accompanied by material that your audience can browse through while you are talking. What you don’t want to do is have the written material merely parrot what you are presenting. You want the handout material to hold its own, and to do that you need to make it standout.
If you want people to like your presentation, then you will need to impress them on all fronts. This means that binders, laminated pages and all other presentation material should look professional and have a style that matches your presentation. If you want, you can use the same font in both presentation and handout material, as long as it is professional, and you should definitely stick with the same color and design themes. This will help your audience make the connection to your presentation should they review the written material later on. Use specialist companies like Filmsource to help make all of your written material standout.
Do Something Different
When you design your presentation, don’t use the same old boring design points that everyone else does. Make your fresh and exciting by giving them something different.
Try ditching the bullet points for another way to show lists, like underlines or different colors that have the same effect as bullets do. Or, better yet, make each point a separate interesting slide: no one’s going to remember a list with 15 bullet points, but if you make seven or eight separate slides that get the information across, then they may remember that.
Also, avoid using serif fonts, which are fonts with the small embellishments on the tips of each letter, like Times New Roman. Instead, use fonts like Helvetica that are easy to read and will not get muddled up in any backgrounds you may use.
Don’t Get Color Crazy
You would be right to think that colors add a great aspect to any presentation, preventing them from being dull and boring. But you would be wrong to assume that means the more colors the better.
Too many colors quickly become an eyesore that turns people off. Rather than using the entire rainbow, choose a few colors that you really like and stick with them, preferably no more than five. You can keep things fresh throughout the presentation by interchanging the way they are used: sometimes they can be background colors, other times you can bring them to the foreground to make your text pop. Just don’t get too crazy!
Creating a pretty yet informative presentation isn’t as hard as it sounds, and everyone will thank you for it after the meeting.
Pat Johnston is a visually creative person, always the student to hand in the best looking essay or report in the class, and something which she has continued to do throughout life. She writes about a range of topics in her articles, look out for her name around the web!
