You’ve been asked to create a presentation with slides. Awesome. Now what? Today we’ll help you get started by answering the kinds of questions you are probably asking. What’s the purpose of presentation media? What kind of stuff needs to be on your slides? What program should you use to create your slides? How do you make your slides look nice? Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered with our beginner’s guide to presentation design.
Know Your Purpose
First, you need to know why you should use presentation media. And the answer comes down to helping your audience follow, understand, and engage with your presentation.
Help the audience follow. This doesn’t mean you give an outline on your slides. But you can use your slides to help the audience recognize the main points of your presentation, along with knowing when you are moving to something new.
Help the audience understand. Because most people are visual learners, what you put on your slides is crucially important to helping many of your audience members understand your content.
Help the audience engage. Your slides can introduce visuals, sounds, and movement that can make your presentation more interesting. And when your audience is engaged, they are better able to focus and to retain the information.
Now that you understand your purpose for using visuals, how do you start?
Plan Your Slides
Start by creating a rough draft of your content. Then, read through the presentation marking what information may be difficult for the audience to understand or follow. Make notes about what you could show the audience that would help the presentation come alive for them. In addition, ask these questions:
Where are there numbers? When you have statistics or raw numerical data, you’ll want to use a visual. For the vast majority of us, we have a harder time processing numbers than words. Check out more information how on to use numbers in presentations here.
What visuals would be helpful? Keep this in mind: you need to show the audience what you are telling them. Telling them about a person? Show them the person. Discussing a place or location? Let them see where it is located on a map. Pitching a product? Show it.
Pick a Slide Design Program
Now that you know your purpose and have a general idea of what you want to put on your slides, it’s time to pick a program. Microsoft PowerPoint is still pretty much king, and for good reason. It offers thousands of templates created by designers. It is intuitive and user friendly. But other programs like Canva Presentations, Apple Keynote, Google Slides, and Prezi are all great alternatives for beginners as well.
Design Your Slides
It’s now time to start designing your slides. If you follow these 7 simple steps, you’ll have an amazing presentation ready in no time.
1. Select a template or create your own. Templates can be hit or miss. Yes, they are created by professional designers. But those designers don’t know the purpose or content of your presentation. If you choose to use a template, use it as a loose guide. Change the layouts, elements, and colors that don’t work for you. If you feel comfortable starting from scratch, go for it!
2. Use colors that are easy on the eyes (no highlighter shades), have high contrast with your background, and work well with any branding colors you may need to use.
3. Limit the amount of text you have on your slides. After all, the job of slides is to show, not tell.
4. Use an easy-to-read font that is no smaller than size 24. You’ll generally want to avoid all caps and cursive fonts which can be hard to read.
5. Make use of design elements like charts, graphics, shapes, and icons available in the program you are using. But remember to use them only if they help your audience to follow, understand, or engage with the presentation.
6. Use content and slide transitions that are consistent and smooth without being distracting (no bouncing or spinning text).
7. Keep it simple. For each slide, focus on the main thing you want the audience to see, know, or feel. Highlight that and leave the other stuff out.
Get Ready to Present
Finally, save your presentation in a couple places and in a couple formats. I always save my PowerPoints both as a PowerPoint file and as a PDF file. Then I save them both on a flash drive and also email them to myself. This gives me a backup in case I run into technology issues on the day of the presentation. Then, start practicing. And use your presentation every time you practice.
You’re now ready to elevate your presentation with incredible slide design. Come back on Thursday when we’ll be looking at 7 design tips specifically for PowerPoint. In the meantime, check out our vast blog library and our portfolio of presentations for more tips, tricks, and inspiration.
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