Basic Elements of Good Slide Presentation Design

Content and design. While your speech may be perfect, the images you show can greatly add or detract from your message.

So,

The slides are there to support your presentation – they are NOT the presentation!

Keep it simple!

Use a simple theme

  • Style guide?
  • Headings and images to appear in the same place on each slide
  • Simple easy to read font
    • Do NOT use multiple fonts! or ‘fun’ fonts

Use minimal text

  • One strong statement, not 17 bullet points!

Create a slide NOT a document

Use single strong images

  • Do NOT use clip art, sound bites or random transitions

And remember,

  • A presenter using text/data heavy slides will be tempted to a) read the text, and b) apologise for how hard it is to read. Neither of which is very professional!
  • If you have text or graphs you want the audience to read – give them a handout (afterwards!)

Tips and Ideas

Powerpoint Hot Tip

Courtesy Kim Hesse, That Was The Best Event Ever

When you are creating a PowerPoint presentation for an event, whether it’s a presentation for yourself, your boss or event sponsor slides my advice would be to export those PowerPoint slides as images (jpegs).

Then what?

Once you have those individual images of your PowerPoint slides, create a new PowerPoint presentation and insert those images as the background to each slide.

*TIP – export the images as high resolution so they are crystal clear on a big screen.

Why?

This will ensure your presentation appears exactly how you intended it to. Nothing can change on your slide because it’s an image. Perfect!

Your fonts and corporate branding will display correctly without running the risk of the presentation computer not having your font installed or your version of PowerPoint. The last thing you want is to be scrambling last minute to fix presentations because the text is all over the place. Oh the stress!

You can absolutely ask your guest speakers to do this as well, hopefully they do. If not, my suggestion would be to gather their presentations before your event and do it for them.

If your presentation has animation, no worries. Simply create a new slide for each animation instead of creating the animation within PowerPoint. (think carefully about whether the animation is really necessary?)

Useful References

Back to Preparing a Presentation