How to Create a Winning Investment Pitch Deck » Presentation Geeks | #powerpointdesigners

Practice your pitch and get a few colleagues to listen to you pitch. They can give you initial feedback on how to balance your storytelling, key information and data.

It is a good way to also boost your confidence and test your material and delivery. You can leave your mistakes in the test kitchen of your pitch, and not live.

With a few good friends, colleagues or even strangers, you can recollect your thoughts and improve your material.

Take notes on what you stumbled on or what you could do better.

You can also time yourself and see if you’re going on too long. A pitch should consist of 10 slides & no more than 15. The presentation should last no more than 20 minutes. This is the Guy Kawasaki rule.

You can also record yourself to do a play-by-play after you’re done presenting. You can also think of your physical performance – your posture, or how you’re standing by your presentation.

Being mindful of your presentation and your presence can help improve your performance in a tangible way.

Tips for designing your presentation

Tell a story by planning your content out before you think of your visual elements

Before you start laying out slides for your entire presentation, think about the main points you would like to get across. This will help inform the design of your slide layouts and is one of the few practical tips for creating a good presentation.

A great example of how content planning informs design is first coming up with a great title. For eg, if you are doing a presentation on increasing literacy for children in school, you could think of what major points you could make for your presentation and craft a title like “How to Fund for Middle Grade Fiction and Non-Fiction Books” versus something to broad like “Get Kids Reading”.

When you define like this, in this example, you can find middle grade children photos versus a wide range of children at different ages, and you can make the Powerpoint geared to finance and grant funding, so you may consider a template that looks like more like a business presentation than say a Powerpoint presentation that looks like it was meant for children.

Establish a consistent layout or use your branding

Really, you can do a lot with one slide in seeing which colours, fonts and images work for you. But if you want to get in deeper, you can start with designing three slides: your title slide, a list slide and a slide with a blurb and photo.

Once you design these three, you can use the style for the Powerpoint, and keep it clean and consistent on any new slide you create.

Use effective fonts for your presentation template

You can get a lot of using one main font and playing with its types: italic, light, regular, semi-bold, bold and extra bold, and you can also use size to create a hierarchy.

For instance, you can make all titles bold and size 44; all sub titles semi-bold and size 40; and the body font regular and size 30, and as long as the entire slide follows this order, things will look clean and consistent.

But if you would like variety, pick two fonts to use and do not use more than that. One font should be clean and readable, like Times New Roman, Arial or any font that is similar.

Colours

Like font, it is best if you only pick a few colours for your presentation.

You can use colour wheel theories. Primary colors in the RGB color wheel are the colors that, added together, create pure white light. Secondary colors are colors that result from mixing two primary colors.

Think of the most effective brands and what are their colour schemes?

Think of Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter – they have one key colour and maybe one or two more colours associated with them.

A photo or video is worth a thousand words in a presentation

A photo can illustrate a point or concept without words and within seconds, so use images to your advance.

When picking colours, you could start with your branding colours or simply think which colours are readable.

Would white and teal work in terms of reading? Probably not.

But a nice navy blue and white would. And if you choose an accent to navy and white, looking at a colour wheel would show you perhaps choosing yellow would be a nice compliment.

An engaging presentation relies on people being able to read it and for their eyes not to get distracted by too many colours in the powerpoint slides.

The last thing you want is your slide deck to look too gaudy and bright for your audience to read.

A way of thinking of colour and seeing its use in the real world is this: the next time you are in a cafe or fast-food restaurant, what colour and design are their menus?

Menus have a detailed list of items but they’re very easy to use and very well designed in terms of colour and readability.

You could also use an animated gif or animate the images to appear one by one if you are presenting something that needs to be shown in steps.

You can keep your audience engaged in what you’re saying if you have a powerful supporting visual.

Maybe you have a flow chart or a series of images to illustrate a point. The fade-in animation can do wonders for staggering information out as you present just on a single slide.

Pay attention to white space in your presentations

One simple technique is to pay attention to white space in your powerpoint presentations. This is probably the most important of our powerpoint presentation tips.

White space is the area between design elements. It can be any color, texture, pattern, or even a background image.

In your presentation slides, make sure there is enough breathing space between images and text; that the reading order works with the design.

Use a presentation template

There is also nothing wrong with using a powerpoint presentation template for your slide deck.

What if you just want to work on your performance and not the presentation design? Maybe you’re feeling more nervous and need to work through the public speaking component of it, which is a reality for many people.

You can read more design tips in our other article here!
What decks do you find the most impactful? Share below!