8 best practices for designing PowerPoint presentations
Effective presentation design is critical. Let’s face it, most of us would rather go to the dentist than sit through a dry, dull sales presentation or marketing presentation where the audience is subjected to slides filled with endless bullets, complicated charts, and bad clip art.
Here are 8 best practices for creating effective PowerPoint sales presentations and marketing presentations:
Presentation Design Tip #1:
Know your audience – identify the key takeaways and call to action
It’s important that you create your presentation with your audience in mind.
- Who is your audience?
- Why are they here?
- What are their objectives?
- What are their pain points or challenges?
- How do you address or solve their problems?
- What are their ojections?
- What are the key ideas you want them to take way from your presentation?
- What do you want them to do?
Presentation Design Tip #2:
Start with a clear storyline and narrative
Before diving into your PowerPoint design, outline the storyline and narrative you want share. Highlight the main ideas you want to feature on the slides and identify where you’ll speak to the rest. You can ultimately include the full text of what you’d like to say in the script notes.
Presentation Design Tip #3:
Embrace simplicity: Less is more.
Don’t treat PowerPoint like a teleprompter. To create a winning sales presentation, keep the amount of text on a slide to a minimum. People came to hear a presentation, not to read one. Keep your audiences engaged by displaying only the key points of your message—or better yet, visuals that support your message. Don’t read the slides verbatim as that will encourage the audience to “read along” and focus on the slides, not you. To help with this, use phrases over sentences. Think of the slides as a hint about the message you’re trying to convey, not the entire message itself. Often, you can incorporate a memorable story or anecdote to punctuate key points.
Presentation Design Tip #4:
Spread your message across multiple slides
If you do have several key points to make, consider using a separate slide for each main point. If you sit on one slide while you make 10 different points, your audience will grow bored quickly. Keep them engaged by moving quickly from one slide to the next. Slides are free, so it costs you nothing to use more!
Presentation Design Tip #5:
Stay on brand
Aside from sticking to your company messaging and positioning and tone of voice, consider how the presentation looks visually.
Choose fonts for your presentation
Ideally, your brand fonts are san-serif fonts, as they tend to be more legible in a presentation than traditional serif fonts. San serif fonts do not have decorative “serifs” at the end of strokes. Use no more than three sizes: small, medium, and large. Text needs to be legible for a variety of scenarios – from laptop screens if your audience is attending your presentation virtually, or for those who like to sit at the back of the room. If it’s too small they’ll concentrate on trying to read it, instead of listening to you—or just tune out completely.
While you may have your own brand font if it’s not a common font that is installed on most computers, and you intend to distribute as a PowerPoint rather than converting to a PDF, remember to choose one of your brand’s secondary typefaces – which are often used for Microsoft Office documents like PowerPoint and Word.
Check your presentation for contrast
Make sure you have adequate contrast between your text and the background for legibility. Test your presentation on the screen you’ll be using and make sure you can see the chosen text color from the back of the room or through a virtual meeting platform.
Use restraint when including color in your presentation
Don’t jump between too many colors or you will dizzy your audience with the kaleidoscope. Use color strategically to break up sections, for example. On the slides themselves, try to limit yourself to only one or two colors besides any full-color images
Presentation Design Tip #6:
Strengthen your story with compelling images, icons, and graphics
People recall information better if its paired with imagery, especially if the images are compelling. Incorporate photos, icons, and graphics in your presentation that are on-brand and relevant to your message. Clip-art and cartoons are not typically on-brand.
Royalty-free images and icons from Getty, Adobe, or Shutterstock are often the first place to look beyond your own custom image library. They also have video that can be used sparingly to dress up a slide.
There are also sites with free images including Unsplash, Pexels, and Burst but make sure you understand the use cases and requirements as you may need to attribute the photo.
Another way to punctuate points in your presentation is to quantify your point and support your message visually with charts instead of text. This is often a much more impactful way to convey complex information such as increase or decrease over time.
Presentation Design Tip #7:
Limit dissolves, spins, or other transitions
PowerPoint offers a plethora of transitions and animations to choose from. While fun to play with, these should be limited to personal use (vacation slideshow, anyone?). For professional presentations, they can often be distracting and do little to support your message. There are occasions when you want to reveal information at certain stages in a slide to tell a greater story. Just limit these when possible.
Presentation Design Tip #8:
Set a consistent structure and stick to it
Finally, it’s important to keep the placement and size of your text consistent throughout. It may sound boring, but this is the foundation of a well-designed deck. Full-screen images or color can be sprinkled in to wake up your audience and reinforce your message.