20 tips for better presentation design
Improve your presentation and wow your audience.
If you need to design a compelling pitch deck, presale presentation, or create training material that will keep the audience engaged this is an article for you.
1. Understand the presentation goals
The first question you need to ask before creating any presentation is “ What is the goal?. A clearly defined presentation objective is the first step to a remarkable presentation.
2. Know your audience
Understanding the interests and motivations of the primary audience, help you create a sharper and relevant targeted message. Creating a story with this person in mind and framing your offer for them.
3. The shorter your presentation the better
If your presentation is longer, create breaks or change of format every 20 minutes to recharge the audience’s attention.
4. Storytelling helps keep audience attention
Storytelling when done right can forge a powerful connection with the audience, keep them invested, and engaged. Not without reason story climax is counterbalancing when you would have the lowest attention point. There are various frameworks for storytelling that you can employ for your presentation, usually they all share those key elements:
Hero- Customer, user, organization, team, etc
Problem- Challenges, pain points, risks
Guide- Product, Company or service
Journey- Vision and concrete plan to solve the problem
Success- Bright future and transformed hero
5. Current human attention span is 8 seconds
That means if the information on your slide can not be consumed under 8 seconds that is a high chance it will not be consumed fully as we will get distracted.
6. Reduce text and add visuals
Your presentation is not a book, it's supposed to be the most efficient way to get to a certain point. Reducing the text and using visual aids for support will help keep the audience focus.
7. Use fonts hierarchy
If you cannot further trim copy, use fonts hierarchy to highlight important messages and clearly communicated content structure. We are used to scanning not reading.
8. Make sure your text is readable
It’s easy to over style text in with the good intentions of highlighting the most important. Avoid all capital body text, too colorful, or low contrast text.
9. Keep in mind how the deck will be shared
The set of slides for someone to present and presentation that will be shared on their own are quite different. Presenters can add context in their speech and additional text on the slide will be redundant.
10. Highlight key points
Extracting the most important data points and highlighting them with larger typography or iconography will help them stand out and be more memorable.
11. Use infographic
Infographics help to make large amounts of data easily digestible, better make sense of, and recall the presented data. Use an infographic to your advantage, and it’s highly encouraged to get more creative with your visuals.
12. Don’t be too concerned with the number of slides
Often I hear a requirement like — “ this presentation should fit on 7 slides, but we cannot remove any content”. Don’t cram content into a specific number of slides, that’s just doesn’t make any sense. An optimal number of slides in a presentation is always variable and depends on length, type of presentation, and how it’s shared. 20 -30 slides is a healthy number for most presentations.
13. Tripple your white space
Whitespace is one of the most overlooked elements that make up a great presentation layout.
14. Avoid unnatural stock photos
Good images are full of emotions and tell real stories. In your presentation, you want to tell a story that is as genuine as it can be. Unfortunately, is easier said than done, most stock photos websites are lacking realistic photography. Look for resources like https://unsplash.com/ that host a curated collection of royalty-free images.
15. Use consistent and appropriate styles
Many factors influence presentation visual style: topic, audience, branding. Make sure you are not too serious or too childish when you don’t need to. Stick to consistent styles for your fonts, icons, colors, and illustrations throughout the whole presentation. Defining key slides templates (Master file ) can help you be consistent.
16. Insert breather slides
Those slides help the audience and presenter catch a break. Can indicate a transition from one part of the presentation to another.
17. Animations and slide transitions
Have the power to either elevate or let down your presentation. My suggestion is to use subtle animations that are closely tied with content and support messages.
18. Help viewers understand their progress through the deck
This is specifically important in longer and complex presentations. Such indications will help create a feeling of progression.
19. Rehearse! Record yourself
This is a great test for your freshly designed deck. Rehearsals help you identify gaps and dull points in the presentation.
20. Apply design thinking to your presentation
This process is a little different from the app or website design, and almost all aspects and activities of design thinking can help you create a successful presentation. You can find this article useful if you want to learn more about this.
