How to Design Great PowerPoint Slides

Posted by Sabrina George on Fri, Apr 17, 2015 @ 12:29 PM

Whether you are hosting a webinar or a presentation to your company, you may want to make use of PowerPoint to create a good presentation. Before you get started, you may wonder what exactly makes a PowerPoint slide good. There really isn’t a right or wrong answer to this question. However, if you use these guidelines, you will be able to create PowerPoint slides that are right for your presentation.

Context Is Important

Whether the slide is appropriate or not for your particular audience is more important than whether it is good or bad. However, it is common for people to think more in terms of what is good or bad, particularly in the area of design. When it comes to PowerPoint slides for your presentation, it is important to consider the best way to layout your page so it is easy to understand and follow by your audience. Therefore, you need to think about the content and images you want to use and create a slide with the right placement for your audience.

Keep It Simple

Simplicity is an important element to creating PowerPoint slides that are effective for your audience. Sometimes the best graphics are those that are created with simplicity in mind. However, just because the design is simple doesn’t mean the presentation lacks information. As long as you put the work into the content and the context of each slide, a simple slide can be even more effective than one that is more complex. Keeping your audience in mind will help you make sure your design is not too complicated for them to understand.

Some people view simplicity as a way to provide greater clarity to the information you are trying to provide. If you are careful about the story you are trying to portray through your presentation is best told with visuals that will support the story and clue your audience in more easily. However, you may not know just how to create that simplicity. You may wonder if there is a specific formula that must be followed to make sure your presentation follows this law of simplicity.

There is no easy answer to this question. However, if you think about it, you will realize the formula to simplicity requires you to break down each problem and issue into its individual components. The ability to break everything down into smaller elements will provide you with the simplicity you desire in your presentation. However, there is still no clear answer for everyone. Each person and industry must decide what that simplicity means to them.

Because there is no specific formula, the design of your presentation will be a combination of art and science you must work on. You need to consider the needs of your audience, as well as your company, so you can determine just what information you need to portray in your presentation. When you apply these needs to the context and content in your presentation, the answer will become clear for you, though no one else will be able to use the same answer you will.

Visual Changes

The best way to cover the need for visual changes in your slides is to use a brief example. For instance, if you are creating slides as a part of your presentation that detail important statistics you want your audience to remember, you need to look at the way you have designed these slides. You may attempt to use irrelevant clip art with the text that details the statistic or you may use a specially designed chart that illustrates your statistic. Both of these methods portray the information but often in an unclear manner, such as boring backgrounds, text that blends in and 3D graphics. All of these things should be avoided for better slides.

Instead, you can better portray the graphics you want your audience to remember for future reference by creating slides that are more uniform with the rest of the presentation. Your entire presentation should follow a theme, including the background colors of the slides. In your redesigned slides, you should make sure the text that details the statistic stands out from the background and you use a graphic that reflects that statistic. You don’t need to include a lot of information on a slide. Your verbal presentation will elaborate.

You can still use a graphic, such as a chart, to reflect the statistic, but it is important to use a plain chart, not one that is in 3D. You can also create a slide that simply features your statistic as a headline. However, you need to turn that headline into a full declarative sentence, rather than a short headline, for the greatest impact.

How Should You Design Your Slides?

Even with the examples above, there’s no way for any person to tell you exactly how to design your slides for your presentation. Each presentation should be unique to you, providing your audience with the information they need in an easy-to-understand and read manner. You also need to take into consideration the topic of your presentation. A non-technical presentation can easily use slides that are extremely simple. However, if you are presenting on a more technical topic, such as technology, you may need to add a little more complexity to the slides for the best impact. Even with this complexity, though, the focus should still be on simplicity.

Therefore, there is no good or bad when it comes to your PowerPoint slides. Instead, you need to consider your topic and your audience and go from there as you design your presentation.

Tags: powerpoint presentation, online web event, online communications, powerpoint, Online meetings, Planning for a Webinar, online webinar

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