(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading...Millions of presentations are created, and you may have seen at least hundreds of presentations in your lifetime. Yet, how many of them do you remember a few days or weeks after you have seen them?
You may see the occasional, amazing slide that you remember, but for most of us who are not PowerPoint designers, the bad slides are similar to what a Google Images search for the same term shows up, as you can see in Figure 1, below.
Figure 1: A search for ‘bad slides’ on Google Images
In so many ways, the results in Google Images is representative of what’s bad in the world of PowerPoint design. You see slides that are:
- Uninspiring, because they look so similar to millions of other slides.
- Text-heavy, because so many presenters use slides as a teleprompter, and they actually read out from slides to their audiences.
- Color-ineffective, because color choices are plainly wrong. Notice the slides in the search results that don’t have a white background–and you will have trouble reading any text on those slides.
- Busy and detailed, because too much is happening within a relatively smaller area.
In this post, we will look at five easy guidelines that you can implement today within your slides so that you can end up with better-looking PowerPoint presentations.
1. Reduce Slide Content
First of all, many people seem to think of PowerPoint slides as an extension of Word documents! Nothing could be further from the truth. The problem with such presentations may stem from the fact that your boss may hand over a Word document, and expect you to create a presentation from the document, and may also expect that you will faithfully reproduce all content within the Word document in your slides!
This is not as difficult as it sounds. That’s because your slides need not have the entire content pasted from the Word document. You will have to be inventive, and make your content concise enough to make sense, and yet be small enough in length to justify its presence in a PowerPoint slide.
Many times, you can also look for help from custom PowerPoint presentation writers, who may help you create a professional outline for your slides.
Related Link: PowerPoint is not Word or Excel
2. Balance Between Text and Visuals
Yes, text-heavy slides don’t work too well, because too much text is never interesting. Worse, it looks monotonous, as you can see in Figure 2, below.
Figure 2: Text alone, can be monotonous
The other extreme is a presentation that is composed mainly of pictures, and contains pictures just because someone heard the adage, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ This is similar to the slide you can see in Figure 3, below.
Figure 3: Pictures alone, can look lost
The balanced approach us to use amazing pictures accompanied by intelligent one-liner titles or brain-tickling captions, as shown in Figure 4, below.
Figure 4: A balanced approach works best, with both text and pictures
So what does that mean? It means that some text is still needed to increase the curiosity of your audience. Therefore, always try to maintain the right balance between text and visuals.
3. Split Content Between Multiple Slides
There are times when you really have too much content on a slide, and cannot remove any part because all content is essential. In such scenarios, explore dividing your slide content between two or more slides.
4. Use Colors Better
Many slides can just be improved with judicious use of color, and yet this is perhaps the area people overlook the most!
Look at Figure 6, below that shows the improper use of colors. Note that all colors are highly saturated.
Figure 6: Improper use of colors
Compare with the less saturated colors in the slide you see in Figure 7, below.
Figure 7: Proper use of colors
5. Think From the Audience’s Point of View
We saved the best tip for the end. You may use all the best tips to create the most amazing slides ever, but if these slides were not created for your audience, then they are useless! What does this mean? Many presenters use PowerPoint slides to display content that they want to show, rather than creating content that the audience wants to see.
Before you even start to create your slides, think about your audience. In fact, imagine yourself as a part of that audience and think about what you want to see on the slides? This approach will help you create much better slides, that have a soul, and also a message that the audience is ready to accept.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer or company. This is a promoted post.
Related Posts
Slide titles are very important. First of all, they identify a slide. Secondly, they provide structure to your presentation, because anyone who uses P...
By Barrera AlcovaPresentation skills are pretty critical today if you want to succeed at school or work. The ability to express your ideas clearly rel...
Is it possible to change a text box into a Title in PowerPoint? I've got tons of slides that use text boxes instead of Title and Content placeholders,...
This has been a frustrating issue for many PowerPoint users, and also users of other Office programs. You type some text that is sentence case, but th...