What, according to you, is the most important aspect of an impressive presentation – content or design? Well, impactful presentations have the perfect blend of content and design. They are aesthetically pleasing, and at the same time, succinct and informative. Unfortunately, most of the professionals often neglect the design aspect, giving more weightage to content, and thus end up delivering a disastrous slideshow.
In this blog post, we have covered some crucial presentation design principles; apply them in your slides and see how much effectiveness they bring to your message.
- Don’t Underestimate the Power of Color
Recall any of the recent brands or ads that you have recently seen on television, billboard, or social media. What things did you remember hooked you? Colors right?
Colors matter in your presentation design as they have psychology associated with them. Colors stir experiences, connections, emotions, and feelings in the audience, which helps reinforce your message. So, choose an impactful and harmonious color combination to accentuate your information.
- Use a contrasting color to highlight your core points.
- While creating graphs, charts, and other visuals, keep in mind your corporate colors.
- Instead of picking your favorite color randomly, choose and use colors with a purpose.
- Keep your background color different from the color of other visual elements.
- Don’t use those colors that mask the text.
Learn more about color psychology in this video:
- Go Beyond Default Settings
Many times, due to overburdening of work and lack of time, presenters tend to choose default settings while crafting presentations, which do not cast the intended spell on the audience. Here, you must understand that you need to go the extra mile and beyond the default settings to make your presentations stand out. By making tweaks in graphics, colors, fonts, and other aspects, you can transform the default presentation into the designer one and draw more attention from the audience.
- Be Wise while Using Animations
Animations liven up your presentations by making them more engaging, compelling, and interactive. Don’t use animations just for embellishing your presentation; use them with intention.
- Don’t make your PPT look over-animated, as it will sabotage the value of your message and distract the audience.
- Avoid mixing different types of animations; choose the one that goes well with your presentation.
- Use the animation effects following the direction for your content.
- Don’t use animations just for the sake of using them.
Watch this video for some powerful and effective animation tips:
- Design Your Slides Around the Focal Point
This principle is all about highlighting one specific aspect of the slide, be it a piece of text, a data set, or an image, depending on the objective of your presentation. This focal point helps captivate the vision of the audience. Design your rest of the slides to maximize visual flow to key points from that focal point.
- Grid Theory of Designing
If your slides are centered around more than one focal point, segment your design into separate quadrants or grids. This way, you will be able to organize the visual space optimally. These grids are helpful in separating key points and distinguishing the images from each other. This designing principle works well if you want to solicit the opinion of the audience through your presentation.
The Inference
Design is something that should not be overlooked. Beautifully and aesthetically designed PowerPoint templates give your presentation a professional and cohesive look and create an engaging user experience. Further, you can craft an intriguing visual story by combining various design elements thoughtfully.
In a nutshell,
“Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs
Do you have any tips related to design to take the presentation to the next level? Share your thoughts with us in the “Comment” section below. And if you like the blog post, do share it on your social media handles.