how to make a presentation look less empty

From Cluttered to Clear: How to improve your PowerPoint slides

By Paul Moss

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Your main goal should always be to make your slide as readable and easy to understand as possible..

Back in 2014 activist Hedge Fund Starboard Value made a successful bid to oust the board at Darden Restaurants, a company that owns multiple restaurant chains in the US including a beloved Italian restaurant called Olive Garden.   

In this post, I’m going to take one of the slides from this presentation and show you exactly how to take boring unprofessional slides, and turn them into slides that are clear, insightful, and engaging.  I’ll walk through each step of the redesign explaining the logic behind each choice and why it matters for your audience.  Plus I’ll provide you with some great PowerPoint tips along the way to help you build your slides a whole lot faster. 

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“Transforming Darden Restaurants” Starboard Value, September 2014

As you can tell the slide is all about breadsticks, and how Olive Garden’s lack of training and discipline is leading to reduced profitability and a poorer guest experience. 

The first thing that strikes me about this slide is just how much text there is. That’s not inherently bad — a common feature of slides in consulting, strategy, or finance is that they contain a lot of information that needs to be digested by the audience all at once. 

What’s difficult about these types of slides is that they can overwhelm the audience. Especially if it’s delivered live where the audience has to read all the information on the slide, listen to the speaker, and potentially think of a response. Even for a smart person, it’s a lot to ask. So your job as slide creator is to  make it as easy as possible for the audience to understand your message by limiting distractions, drawing attention to the important parts of the slide, and guiding your audience visually. 

When you look at this slide, which parts of the slide are distracting, and are they important to the slide’s message? For me, it was the dark blue boxes: the one down at the bottom with the slide’s main message, but then also the blue labels for the table. The box at the bottom says, “Olive Garden is famous for its unlimited breadsticks, but poor execution around this signature item we believe both increased costs and hurt the guest experience.” To me, this is a pretty important takeaway from the slide, so I’ll leave it in place for now.

But then how about the other blue boxes? Do they need to stick out so much? I need them to support the information in the table, but I don’t think they should command so much attention. 

So the first thing I’m going to do is remove the attention-grabbing blue color. I’ll do that by holding the control key as I select all the objects (or CMD key if you’re using a Mac), then using my ribbon shortcuts to change the shape fill and the font. 

I’ll hit Alt to access the commands in the ribbon, then H for home, then SF for shape fill, and then N for no fill. And then obviously the text can’t be white so I’ll follow the same process to get to the Home tab, then hit FC for font color, and choose the blue color. 

Another thing on this slide that I think is unnecessarily distracting is the picture of breadsticks down at the bottom.  The rule with pictures on a slide is you want to make sure it’s contributing to the message in some way, and not just there for good looks. 

This one could probably go either way because, on the one hand, I think it’s good to be able to visualize the topic, but on the other hand, we all know what a breadstick looks like and this isn’t providing any new information. Not to mention, I don’t think it fits in cleanly on the slide – it just sort of sits down at the bottom and isn’t aligned with anything. So I’m just going to delete it. 

Now on to the background.  The general rule for backgrounds is if you notice it, you need to change it.  And this one I noticed right away. Maybe it’s just me but it’s incredibly distracting and almost looks a little unprofessional, especially when the text is also blue. 

So to delete this unsightly background I’m just going to right-click on the slide and go to format background, select solid fill, then choose white. 

Now I know what you might be thinking here, this slide is starting to look a little plain. But remember,  the first step here is to remove distractions that aren’t important to the slide’s message,  so that’s what we’ve done. Now, we’re going to put more emphasis on the important parts. And this is where it starts to get a little more interesting.

Generally speaking, the most important part of any slide is the title. People like to look there first, so you want to make sure your title attracts attention and provides valuable information. On this slide, however, the blue box down at the bottom is a little more attention-grabbing, so  the path for the audience isn’t quite as clear.  Should they look at the title first? Or the box? Or maybe the subtitle?  We want to remove that complexity and make it as easy as possible for the audience to know where to look first, then second, then third. 

The title of the slide says, “Breadsticks: just one example of food waste”, which is short but provides a good idea of what the slide is all about. Then there’s this subtitle, “As just one example, we believe lapsed discipline around Darden’s renowned unlimited salad and breadsticks offering has led to both high food waste and a worse experience”. 

You might have noticed that this sounds very similar to what is already in the box down at the bottom, and I don’t think we need both. Of the two I like the bottom one better so I’m going to select the text by hitting control A, the control C for copy, and go up to the top and right-click and go to paste, then over to the option that says paste as text. That way I don’t have to worry about formatting. 

I mentioned earlier that you want to guide your audience visually, and part of this includes  directing their attention to the highest level ideas first, and then to the details.  The idea behind this is the Pyramid Principle, which we’ve explained in more detail  here , but basically, it’s a method of communication that involves starting with your main point, then working your way through the supporting details of that main point. The advantage of this approach is that it helps you communicate a lot of information in a way that’s easy to understand and digest. 

The way we do that on a slide is by making sure the title captures the slide’s primary takeaway, and that it’s the most attention-grabbing part of the slide so the audience looks there first.

Take a look at the BCG slide below for example.  Notice how the title sticks out from the rest of the slide.  It’s bold, it’s got a large font, and it has a dark green line underneath it. By reading the title first the audience will understand the main takeaway for the slide, so when they get to the details in the chart and in the bullet points, they’ll have some guidance and some context. 

To maximize the clarity of our Olive Garden slide I’m going to do the same thing – put the main idea at the top, and then the supporting points beneath it. It looks like they’ve kind of done that already by putting a short title on the top, then a more detailed subtitle just below it. This is something I see quite a bit, and I think it accomplishes the goal of providing a summary of the slide. 

But the issue is the subtitle is really where the main takeaway is, and  it doesn’t grab that much attention.  So what I’m going to do instead is move that text to the title, and just delete the subtitle. Then I’ll just cut out some words from the title so it fits and drag some of the other objects up to get rid of some white space. Now we have a nice clear title that summarizes the slide really well. 

Alright now that we’ve got the main message of the slide clearly in place, we can worry about the rest of the content on the slide (and this is where things can get tricky). There’s a lot of text on the slide so  we need to find a way to naturally separate the different sections so they’re easy to distinguish visually. 

The first thing I’m going to do is to separate out the takeaways down at the bottom. They’re obviously very important in helping to show the difference between 10 years ago and today, so I want to make sure they don’t blend in too much with the rest of the text. The easiest way to do this is by holding the control key and selecting each of the boxes, dragging the bottom part of the box up, and then I’m just going to duplicate them by holding down the control and shift keys and dragging them in a straight line downwards. 

Then I’ll just change the text to say what I want, and increase the font by hitting Control Shift and the greater than sign, then bolding it by hitting Control B. Then I can get rid of the extra text and move the icons to the side for later use. 

By the way, if advanced keyboard shortcuts like this are new to you, or if your PowerPoint skills could use an upgrade, make sure you check some of our other resources on PowerPoint. We’ve got some great posts here on our blog, a very popular (and free)  PowerPoint shortcuts cheat sheet , and full courses that provide  advanced PowerPoint training  for consulting, strategy, and finance professionals. 

Now on to the text. Notice how right now the text is  all the same color and at first glance it sort of blends together.  So to make it a little easier to process I’m going to first change the main text to black. I’m also going to make sure the bullet points are black as well, and I can change these things pretty quickly just by using my ribbon shortcuts.

Another thing I’m going to do is separate the subtitles/labels a little better by increasing the text size and adding lines underneath the top two. A neat trick to know here is  when you’re adding a new line, hold the shift key and the line will be perfectly straight every single time. 

Then I’ll make it black, and copy it over using the same shortcuts from earlier. Then just for good measure I’ll delete the extra line and increase the font size of the main text, just to make things a little more readable.

The takeaways down at the bottom feel separated from the main text but I think we can do a bit better. First of all, I want to align them better and I can do that by selecting each of the text boxes and going up to the align text menu in the ribbon, and selecting middle. 

I’m also going to try and use the icons because I think they do a good job of providing a visual cue for which approach is better. So first I’ll adjust the margins of the text box and move the text over, and I can do that by again using the ribbon shortcut to get into the format shape menu, and changing the left margin. Then I’ll just drag the icons over and make them a little bigger. Then I think we can take it just one step further by putting a shaded box behind the text to make it pop just a tiny bit more.

Another critical part of formatting is you want to  continue to draw attention to what matters.  We’ve already done that with the title at the top, and the key takeaways down at the bottom, but you can also bold the keywords on the slide to make skimming the content just a little bit easier. Not everyone likes to do this, but I think it adds a nice touch. 

So I’m just going to read through the text and bold what I think is most important. It’s going to be hard to notice much of a difference because we’ve already been looking at this slide for so long, but for someone looking at this slide for the very first time, bolding keywords like this can make a big difference. 

Then just a few more finishing touches to help with the spacing on the slide and the overall look and feel.

So as we compare the slide with the original, you can see that it looks quite a bit different. The slide might not be the best-looking slide out there, but  anyone who looks at this slide is going to have a significantly easier time processing the details and understanding the main takeaway. 

Ultimately, your main goal isn’t to make the slide as “pretty” as possible.  Your main goal is to make your slide as readable and easy to understand as possible.  We didn’t really change any of the content on the slide or remove any of the information, but we did reformat it in a way that’s more natural for a first-time viewer. 

You can watch a video version of this article on YouTube .

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How to use WHITE SPACE to make your PowerPoint slides look less rubbish

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'How do I make my slides look less rubbish?'

As a designer, I get asked this question all the time... I frequently get sent my colleagues' presentations which need, in their words, 'Gaya's magic'. ;-)

But it's not magic, really, just applying a few basic rules of layout and design. There are a few ways to approach the subject of making your PowerPoint slides perfect. In this mini series, I would like to give you a few pointers which will help you if you think your slides need 'beautifying', making them more sleek and easier to read. Starting with the most important one, in my view. 

Remember white space!

A very common mistake is trying to squeeze as much information into one slide as possible. The problem is that if you throw too much on the screen you get chaos and a slide that's really hard to read.

You need to become friends with 'white space' (or 'negative space”), which refers to the empty space between and around elements of a design or page layout. Some consider it a waste of valuable screen estate, not realising it is an essential design element which keeps the content clear to read. 

Separation and reducing slide clutter 

A cluttered page is unattractive and difficult to read. So, if there is too much on the page and, by adding white space, you are running out of space it means you need to remove some content.

Improved readability and comprehension

White space can make the slide easier to read and scan and therefore improve readability and comprehension. It will guide users on a page, create balance and indicate hierarchy of elements. In other words it tells the receiver what to look at first and which parts to direct their attention to.

According to a study by Microsoft, the average human being now has an attention span of eight seconds (less than a goldfish, with a impressive nine-second attention span!). If you would like your slide to be remembered and understood in seconds, keep it simple and use plenty of white space, which has been proven to increase comprehension.

Less is more 

White space implies elegance and sophistication. You might have noticed that, in their web and print advertising, many big brands use a ton of white space. It's because it screams luxury and elegance. And confidence in their message. 

Consider one of the old, but famous Volkswagen ads 'Think small'. This revolutionary advert contained only essential parts of the message, leaving room for the viewer’s gaze to rest. The result was a simple, uncluttered and honest advert that reflected the 'no-frills' offering of the Beetle itself.

This minimalism principle translates really well to presentation design. You should always aim to present your content as clearly and cleanly as possible, and the best way to do this is to get rid of clutter and anything non-essential. Check out this article for some excellent examples of minimalism applied to presentation design. 

Active and passive white space

White space can also be either active or passive. Active white space refers to creating white space around elements that are often asymmetrical or inconsistent with the rest of the composition, which helps create focus and the focal point of your slide.

Passive white space refers to space between elements to make sure they look aligned and symmetrical. It occurs naturally, for instance between text lines or graphic elements, or margins around the page / graphic elements. This also means paying attention to equal spacing between elements, especially if they are in a group. The equal and consistent spacing gives the design a cleaner look - so make sure you become good friends with the PowerPoint align tool. Also, adding more space to a design element such as a logo will make it stand out more. 

There you have it! Hopefully now you will know that white space is not a wasted space. Remember, the things you leave out are just as important as those you use! So, if you keep staring at your PowerPoint slides thinking: 'it looks ugly, but I don't know why...' consider: 'White space: is there any? Is my spacing consistent? Are my important design elements jumping out enough? Do I need to remove something?'. Put your chaos in order by using white space and applying these few rules of layout and design.

In the next two articles, I'll give you some tips on how to work with type and colour to improve your PowerPoint presentations. 

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More useful reading:

Design Principles: White Space , The Paper Mill Store

Using White Space in PowerPoint Design—a Closer Look , Slide Genius

Why White Space Looks Good in Presentation Design , Slide Store

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How to Fix Busy PowerPoint Slides

• April 12, 2013
• Kevin Lerner

10 quick and easy tips to fix busy PowerPoint slides, reduce on-screen clutter, and improve boring presentations.

Busy PowerPoint slides? You’ve worked and worked on your presentation…but it still looks cluttered and ugly. Here are 10 quick and easy methods to improve busy PowerPoint slides, reduce on-screen clutter and improve boring presentations.

Fixing Busy PowerPoint Tip #1: Simply provide more breathing space.

Rather than cramming all the graphics and text items together, taking up all the available space on a slide, bring the items into the center a bit…shrink them down to a reasonable size…and provide at least 80% “white space” around the items. It creates a more clean and inviting look.

Fixing Busy PowerPoint Tip #2: Group bullets and objects into shapes (SmartArt).

Rather than having a whole page of bullets or graphics, try grouping the points into a few colorful rectangles or squares. That way, they’re psychologically perceived as a collective entity. Also, we remember graphics more readily than text, so work to find a graphic from a stock photo collection or a scanned photo that will support the bullet and make it come alive with graphics.

#3: Eliminate the template.

On slides where there’s no way around the busy-ness (like an organizational chart), simply place your graphics or text on a pure black background. Though templates are great for creating a consistent look, there’s nothing bad about deviating from it once in a while with a non-competing image to get the point across.

#4: Span Bullet Points Across Multiple Pages

It’s a good idea to limit your bullets no more than 6 per page. But this may not be practical in all cases, so rather than cram them all on a single page, split them over 2 or 3 pages. You may consider creating a separate page for each bullet point with related graphics. Though it can add many pages and take longer to develop, the fast-moving graphical pages work to maintain a strong level of interest with the audience. And don’t get worried that you’re adding so many pages to your presentation…it’s virtual! With this method, it’s not uncommon for a 30-minute presentation to have more than 90 slides.

#5: Create a video montage of your graphics.

Instead of a single page comprised of many images, edit a brief video in Google Picasa or Adobe Premiere,(or any other video editing program that imports still images), with each of the graphics moving and dissolving from one to another. Remember to include this video file if you distribute your presentation.

#6: Print Handouts for Complex Concepts

#7: Use animations to introduce text and elements.

Bringing items in one at a time helps to keep the eye focused. Take the time to add transitions and entry/exit effects to your text (dimming bullets after they’ve appeared is also effective), and they’ll flow easier on the eyes of your audience.

#8: Reduce Text, Merge Points, and Eliminate Single Bullets. (Edit).

Bullet points should highlight key words…not showcase entire sentences or paragraphs of text. Let the speaker elaborate/expand upon each bullet point rather than having the audience read the whole speech on screen. Work to reduce your text to only the crucial information. And then work at it again.

#9: Text and Graphics shouldn’t compete for attention.

#10: Drill-Down and Create Interactivity

By using drill-down “hierarchical navigation,” you can navigate from a high level overview (main menu), to different sections of your presentation, with each bullet, title, or graphic, serving as a link to another page with more detailed information.

Though many of these techniques may add time to your development, it’ll pay off in the end with a more memorable and effective presentation.

busy powerpoint , clutter , design , fix busy powerpoint , help , ideas , powerpoint , tips

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Working with whitespace: Presentation design tips

• Written by: Archie McLachlan
• Categories: PowerPoint design , Visual communication

Space: Vast – Unknowable – Useful? At BrightCarbon we’re big fans of taking a ‘less is more’ approach when it comes to text in presentations, instead letting your visuals do the heavy lifting. But once you’ve cut down your text and created those visuals, how do you make sure they look good on the slide? Not everyone’s a graphic designer (and it’s ok to admit that!) but everyone can borrow graphic design best practices to make slides really pop. This blog post explores how you can manipulate whitespace in presentations to create beautifully balanced slides.

‘But BrightCarbon!’ I hear you cry, ‘I can’t leave blank space on my slides, it looks weird!’. Don’t worry, there’s a trick to this. Careful use of whitespace in presentation slides can help draw your audience’s attention to important information and give your slides a more cohesive flow. Stick with us, and we’ll teach you how to make whitespace work for you.

Using whitespace for better layouts

One easy way to create better presentation layouts using whitespace is by adding page margins and gutters to your slides. This makes sure that there’s plenty of breathing room around the elements on your slide.

You can read more about how to do this in PowerPoint, and the importance of grids and guides, in this blog post: Advanced PowerPoint grids and guides .

A grid is a good starting point but isn’t always helpful when you’re figuring out the space between objects on your slide. What can help is having a consistent measuring system that allows you to keep the empty spaces between elements the same size.

There’s an easy technique to this that helps with consistency and balance. Simply create two squares, one bigger and one smaller. Then use the squares as a guide for the space to leave in between elements. Make the bigger square the size of the space around the page/your margins and use the smaller one to determine spacing between the rest of the elements on the slide.

Get all your visuals and text on the slide first, then add your reference squares and copy and paste as needed. Place the squares underneath a text box or image or on a margin and adjust the content as required. By using these ad-hoc guides, you can keep all your content evenly spaced. Once you’re finished, delete out those reference squares and you’re left with a perfectly proportioned slide!

Using whitespace for better storytelling

Although it can be an excellent tool when used correctly, poor use of whitespace in presentations can actually make it harder for an audience to understand a slide. You’ve probably experienced this yourself, even if you didn’t notice what was wrong specifically. If you’re looking at a slide where the content is all over the place, or even just a little off, it doesn’t only look odd but also disrupts the hierarchy and flow of the content. On the other hand, using whitespace well and laying out content in a neat and consistent way can (say it with me now!) help your slides do the work for you! One simple example is grouping. Subtle changes in how objects are placed on a slide give your audience an immediate clue as to how they are related. Look at the slide below:

The six squares on the left are grouped together with equal amounts of space between each square. This gives the impression that each object is equally related to the others, and of equal importance. On the right-hand side, the gaps between the squares form distinct columns which implies that there are 3 categories of object. Thanks to the use of whitespace, the audience immediately has more understanding of the slide content. Visual cues like this can help underline your point, without you having to spell it out over and over again. For more information on visual hierarchy, take a look at this blog post – 5 visual hierarchy tips for effective presentation design .

Using whitespace to draw attention

Let’s think about space (the outer- kind) – space may be an unfathomably vast vacuum with incomprehensible distances of emptiness (I’m not trying to give you an existential crisis, I promise), but what draws your attention when you look at it? It’s not what isn’t there, it’s what is . You’re drawn to the stars, the planets, the tiny pinpricks of light within that dark canvas. The constellations are miniscule compared to the backdrop, but they still grab your attention. You can use this effect on your slides – using emptiness to draw attention to what’s important.

One technique is placing a single statement over a full-bleed image, like in the slide below:

The image takes up the entire slide, so your attention is very quickly drawn to two things – the title, and, in this case, the hot-air balloon. Slides like this make effective title cards or section dividers and, if you carefully select your photography, they can help to tell your story.

Best of all, these types of slides are easy to pull off. You don’t need a degree in design to make a picture fill a slide! However, to make sure these types of slides are accessible you need to have good contrast between the text and the image. Read more here: 5 tips for more accessible presentations . Hopefully these examples show that you don’t need to be afraid of whitespace in presentation design and that whitespace doesn’t actually have to be white, but instead just part of the background that doesn’t pull focus away from your main content.

A key thing to remember, is that there’s no good reason to overfill your slides with content. Instead, split it out across several slides. This will help you pace your presentation and make it easier for the audience to follow along with you. If you want to draw attention to a particular object, make sure not to crowd it. Use whitespace to show the audience what you want them to look at! Give it room to breathe and make it the centrepiece. This can be a useful tool when presenting data. In this example the graph is squashed in and the data isn’t easy to read.

But in the slide below, that graph is given lots of lovely space to itself, making it the main focus and allowing the audience to actually interpret it – the rest of the text can be moved to a different slide or, even better, to the speaker notes.

For more tips on minimalist presentation design, check out this blog post on how to keep your slides simple and clean.

Using whitespace for better text spacing

Paying attention to whitespace doesn’t only apply when you’re thinking about graphic elements, it’s something you should consider when playing with text and typography too. If you’re developing something more text heavy than a presentation, such as an article, a handout, or training – then intentional use of whitespace can make text easier to digest.

People tend to just skim a block of text that has no internal spacing – so if you lay it out like this, no one’s going to read it properly, and all your hard work will have gone to waste.

But with a bit of careful spacing, the text can seem far less daunting.

There are a few ways to add whitespace to text in PowerPoint, but not all are equally useful. One thing you should try to avoid doing is using your Enter key to create more space in between bullet points because it’s time consuming and actually makes your text more difficult to edit. So, what are your other options?

Your first option is PowerPoint’s paragraph spacing settings. To open the settings, select the small arrow in the Paragraph section of the PowerPoint ribbon. By increasing the spacing before or after your paragraph, you can create more space between your bullet points.

As well as space between paragraphs, you also need to make sure there’s enough whitespace between the lines. Though you can adjust line spacing using the pop up above, your options are limited in PowerPoint. This is where our free BrightSlide plug-in comes in handy. With the live paragraph spacing feature, you can format your paragraph and line spacing in one place, see changes live instead of having to wait until the formatting window is closed, and have more granular control over spacing.

With all this in mind, be intentional about how you place objects on your slide and  aware of how it can influence your audience. Use whitespace in your presentations to draw attention to key points, use the space between objects and text to highlight your content, and use the layout to maximise the impact of your slides! So, get out there and start leveraging that space!

Archie McLachlan

Communication consultant, related articles, 3 ways to create slide backgrounds in powerpoint.

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• Comments: 1

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Mastering high-impact conference presentations

• PowerPoint design / Visual communication

Conference presentations are really hard to get right compared to day-to-day presentations. How do you tackle bigger stages, bigger rooms, bigger audiences and higher stakes?

Insights from a presentation templates expert

• PowerPoint design / Industry insights

A PowerPoint template is the foundation on which polished and professional presentations are built. We interview BrightCarbon’s new Templates Lead, Gemma Leamy, and pick her brains on the ideal process for creating robust PowerPoint templates.

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From liaising with our high profile guest speakers to producing effective presentations for the whole day, BrightCarbon's input ensured the smooth running of this high profile event. David Gillan Manchester Insurance Institute

How to Use White Space in PowerPoint Design

Yousef "yoyo" abu ghaidah.

• November 11, 2016
• No Comments

In the context of PowerPoint design, white space (or whitespace (or even 'negative space' sometimes)) is arguably the most important principle of design to take full advantage of.

Sadly, as many you have seen, not many people do that.

You see slides plastered with information, even covering the margins!

We have to put an end to this sort of thing, don't we?

What Exactly Is White Space?

White space is the unused space between the various elements (i.e. shapes, text boxes, pictures, etc.) on your PowerPoint slide.

It's a design tool that is used both actively and passively to transform your slide into something that is crisp, clean, elegant and just plain awesome.

We don't need to create a slide filled with text and graphics just to get our point across to our audience. Instead, with white space, less is more.

To illustrate my point, check out the PowerPoint slide below.

Pay attention to the red arrows highlighting the differences between the elements. Notice how arrows 1 and 2 are approximately the same size, but serve a different purpose.

That is, the amount of space dedicated to separate the text from the shape, is the same amount of space dedicated to separate the shape from the guide.

One more thing - even though we call it white space, that doesn’t mean the actual space has to be white. The blank space may be filled with any color as long as it is free of any elements (e.g. text or images).

VIDEO TUTORIAL

How To Use White Space in PowerPoint

What Does This Video on White Space Cover?

The beauty of this video is that it touches on design theory, technical how-to's and practical examples to really get the point across. I understand it's a little dry, but the material in here is worth understanding to help you conquer your PowerPoint game. Some of the things that this video will include:

• Know the various elements there is to know about white space in PowerPoint (did you know there is macro and micro text?!)
• Set up guides for better alignment in PowerPoint
• Create more space between your text in PowerPoint
• Create more space to your paragraphs in PowerPoint
• Shorten your URLs
• And much, much more!

So sit back, relax, make a coffee, do whatever, and let Slide Cow try and help you to make your PowerPoint slides / decks be as awesome as possible through the use of white space!

Got a project for us?

© Slide Cow. All rights reserved.

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60 Effective PowerPoint Presentation Tips & Tricks (Giant List)

Here's a PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks guide that takes you through how to make a good PowerPoint presentation.

The best PowerPoint presentations shouldn’t be remembered. Instead, they should fall into the background to support you and the message you’re trying to get across.

Unlike good PowerPoint presentations , bad PowerPoint presentations are a distraction. You may remember them, but not in a good way.

You’ve seen them before. They might have millions of lines of text. Or a disjointed flow to the slides. Even worse, some slides feature ugly photos and poor design that detract from the message you’re trying to get across. That can even hurt your credibility as a professional or speaker.

This article will take you from finding your initial topic to learning how to make a great PowerPoint presentation. Our guide covers everything in between so that you learn how to present a PowerPoint like a pro.

These Microsoft PowerPoint presentation tips and guidelines are organized into sections. So cut straight to the advice you need and come back when you’re ready for the next steps.

Guide to Making Great Presentations (Free eBook Download)

Also, download our Free eBook: The Complete Guide to Making Great Presentations . It’s the deepest resource for learning effective presentation skills for a PPT.

This eBook covers the complete presentation process. It takes the PowerPoint tips and tricks you learn in this article further. Learn how to write your presentation, design it like a pro, and prepare it to present powerfully. It’s another great source for presentation design tips.

Master PowerPoint (Free Course): 15 Essential Tips

This article is full of helpful tips so you can build a powerful presentation. You can also find more PowerPoint tips in this video lesson:

To learn even more about how to make a PowerPoint look good, review the huge list of tips below.

What Makes a PowerPoint Presentation Effective?

Knowing how to use PowerPoint and work within it quickly is helpful. But more important is making a good presentation that hits all your goals. A great PowerPoint presentation is:

• Prepared to Win . Research, plan, and prepare your presentation professionally. It helps you deliver an effective message to your target audience.
• Designed Correctly . Your visual points should stand out without overwhelming your audience. A good PowerPoint visual shouldn’t complicate your message.
• Practiced to Perfection . Rehearse your timing and delivery so that your points land as practiced with a live audience.
• Delivered With Poise . Present with a relaxed inner calm and confident outward projection. Give your audience warmth, excitement, and energy.
• Free From Mistakes . Avoid typos, cheesy clip art, and mistakes like reading directly from your slides.

Consider this your all-inclusive guide to how to make a good presentation. We’ll look at preparing your presentation and explore how to design it in PowerPoint. Plus, we’ll cover how to practice and nail your delivery successfully come presentation time.

We’ll also address what not to do in these tips for PowerPoint presentations—so you can sidestep any big mistakes. Now let’s dig into these tips for effective PowerPoint presentations.

Killer Presentation Preparation Tips to Get Started Right

Before even opening PowerPoint, start by addressing these things. These Microsoft PowerPoint tips and tricks will ensure that you’re prepared for your presentation:

1. Know Your Stuff

Your presentation isn’t about your slides alone. It’s about the message you want to get across. Before filling in stats, facts and figures, think about the narrative that’ll be discussed, why, and in what order.

2. Write It Out

Start in a Word or Google doc, and storyboard or script the entire presentation. This will give you an idea of how the information presented will flow and how viewers will see it in sequence. Learn the complete writing process .

3. Highlight What’s Most Important

A presentation covers the most crucial pieces only. Whatever you’ve been working on that led to this—a paper, a work project, a new product design—doesn’t need to be shared in its entirety. Pick key points and put the rest in an “Appendix” to refer to during the Q&A session at the end.

4. Know Your Audience

How you talk to a room full of medical professionals should be different from the way you address a room full of young entrepreneurs. Everything, in fact, is different: your topic selection, the language you use, the examples you give to illustrate points. The little bits of humor you include should be tailored specifically with your target audience in mind.

Understand your audience’s needs to create a successful PowerPoint presentation. Customize your content to meet their specific requirements.

5. Rehearse! (Yes, Already)

It’s never too early to get used to the rhythm of your presentation and take note of points you want to emphasize. While saying it out loud, you’ll start to develop a “feel” for the material. You’ll notice that some things work well, while others don’t and might need to be worked around.

6. Rewrite After You Rehearse

As you’re rehearsing your presentation, you’re bound to stumble over sections that don’t quite flow naturally. Instead of reworking your delivery, it might be time to consider the content and rewrite the areas that served as stumbling blocks.

“Editing is hard. ‘It’s good enough,’ is a phrase wannabes use. Leaders take editing seriously.” – Anthony Trendl

The most important part of creating a great presentation is the writing stage. The second most important stage is rewriting.

7. Share With a Friend

If the stakes are high for your presentation, it’s never too early to get feedback from those that you trust. Here’s an article that helps you collaborate as a team on a PowerPoint presentation. Get PowerPoint design tips from those that you trust when you collaborate.

Simple Tips to Design Your PowerPoint Presentation Better

Second only to you (the information you bring and how you present it) is your PowerPoint slides. If not designed well, a PowerPoint can be disengaging or distracting (regardless of the content quality). Here are some presentation design tips to make sure this doesn’t happen to you:

8. Keep Your Slides Simple

This is one of the most important PowerPoint presentation tips to follow when designing your slides. Keep in mind that less is more (effective.) A cluttered slide is distracting. It causes confusion for an audience: Which part of the slide should I focus on? Should I read the slide or pay attention to the presenter?

A simple, visually appealing slide will engage your audience, keeping them on track with your main points. Here’s an example of a simple slide that serves its purpose perfectly:

Minimalist slide templates like Nook can help you resist the urge to clutter your slides.

9. Limit Words on Your Slides

Piggybacking on the last point, less is more effective. If possible, avoid bullets altogether. Otherwise cut them to just a few simple words. The audience should be listening, not reading.

10. Use High-Quality Photos and Graphics

One of the most important tips for quality PowerPoint presentations is to use high-quality photos and graphics.

Earlier in this tutorial, you saw Envato Elements, an all-you-can-download service with PPT tips inside of templates. Those pre-built designs are a beginner’s best friend. They’re even better when paired with Elements’ unlimited library of stock photos .

People are more likely to take you seriously if your presentation is visually appealing. Users view attractive design as more usable. Similarly, they’ll view a more attractive PowerPoint as more effective.

11. Use Accurate and Relevant Charts and Graphs

Charts and graphs can also be distracting if they’re not used right. Make sure your information design is simple and clean so that the audience doesn’t spend the entire time trying to decipher what your X axis says. Learn more about PPT data presentation .

12. Use High-Quality, Fresh Templates

Have you seen the old PowerPoint template that looks like worn paper and uses ink splashes? Yeah, so has your audience. Templates can be distracting if they’re too basic or if the design feels dated. You need one with great design options.

Costs are always a concern. But when you use Envato Elements, you’ve got everything you need to create a great PowerPoint presentation . That’s thanks to the incredible all-you-can-download subscription package.

The best PowerPoint tips and tricks can hardly compare to the value of using a template while building your presentation.

On Envato Elements, there are thousands of PowerPoint design templates that are ready to use. Instead of designing a presentation from scratch, start with a template! Just add your specifics to the placeholders.

Templates like Galaxi are impressively designed and waiting for your slide specifics.

The best PowerPoint design tips save you time. And there’s no tip more powerful than this one: use a pre-built template . It helps you master how to present a PowerPoint without spending all your time in the app.

13. Choose Appropriate Fonts

Fonts are an important part of engaging your audience. Fonts and typography choices have a subconscious effect on viewers. They can characterize your company’s presentation and brand either positively or negatively. Make sure that you’re choosing fonts that are professional and modern.

14. Choose Color Well

Like font choice, colors cause specific subconscious reactions from viewers. Choosing an outdated color combination for your presentation will render it ineffective.

Below is an example of the Popsicle PowerPoint template , which has a modern presentation color choice:

The Popsicle PowerPoint template highlights how harmonized color palettes can create beautiful slides.

15. Clean + Simple Formatting Makes All the Difference!

We’ve got a full tutorial on how to make a good presentation slide . Give it a read through and review the accompanying video. Just remember, less is more. The focus is you and your message , not your slides.

16. Make Sure All Objects Are Aligned

A simple way to create a well-designed presentation is to make sure all items on a slide are intentionally aligned. To do this, hold down Shift and select all the objects you want to include. Then choose Arrange in the options bar and apply Alignment Type .

17. Limit Punctuation

This isn’t the place for exclamation points. Emphasize your points (while speaking). Don’t enlist punctuation to do this for you. (Leave these at home!!!)

18. Avoid Over-Formatting Your Points

This PowerPoint presentation tip is simple. There’s no need to have every word of every bullet point capitalized, or to have all your bullet points in title case. If possible, drop bullets altogether. Again, the simpler, the better!

Limit your text formatting, including reducing the use of bullets, underline, and other effects. Compare the before example on the left to the revised version on the right.

19. Combine Information With Graphics in PowerPoint

One of the most powerful presentation skills for PPT is using infographics. With the right type of visuals, slides come to life and reduce the text in favor of graphics.

Infographics help combine information with graphics. It’s easier to explain complex ideas when you use visual formats that are intuitive.

Practice Presentation Tips: Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse!

Delivery is probably more important than the actual content. Here’s how to become more aware of your own unique ticks, and how to present like a polished pro:

20. I’ll Say It Again, Rehearse!

Just do it. Again and again. Experiment with pauses, gestures, and body language. Practice around one hour for every minute of your speech.

21. Practice With a Timer

Consistency is key to an effective PowerPoint presentation. The timing should be similar (ideally the same) each time you rehearse. This one will especially pay off when it’s time to present in front of your audience.

22. Slow It Down

Many of the best speakers today intentionally speak slowly. You’ll have the chance to emphasize, appear more thoughtful, and make your information easier to digest.

23. Pause More Often

Like the prior tip, pausing more often allows your main points to be emphasized and gives time for information to sink in. You need to let key points breathe a little before rushing into the next section.

24. Record Yourself

Use your phone’s voice recorder. Assess and critique yourself. Consider:

• Are your pauses too short or too long?
• Are you speaking slowly enough? Too slow?
• When you’re nervous, does your voice get high like the mice in Cinderella?

It’s always weird to hear your own voice recorded; don’t stress it. Use this as a time to adjust.

25. Choose Three Focal Points in the Room

If you stare at the same spot (or even creepier, the same person) the entire time, your presentation will be ineffective (and awkward.) People will be distracted by you, wondering what you’re staring at.

Try this: pick three points in the room (typically: left, center, right). Take time to direct your delivery toward each physical focal point in the room. Also, focus on the center when making your primary points.

26. Vary Your Sentence Length

This makes you sound more interesting, and it’s easier for your audience to follow. Think short and punchy. Or go long and complex for dramatic effect.

27. Modulate!

Don’t speak in monotone for your whole presentation. Be conscious of raising and lowering your voice tone. Otherwise, people will tune you out, and you’ll come across like the teacher in Charlie Brown.

28. Practice in Front of a Mirror

What you look like is as important as how you sound. Pretend you’re having a normal conversation, and allow your hands to move with your speech to emphasize your points. Just don’t get carried away! (I’m thinking Brene Brown or President Obama , not your Aunt Jamie after a few gin and tonics.)

29. Use “Present Mode” When Rehearsing

When you finally are ready to hit the Present button in PowerPoint, make sure you use the Present Mode option. This allows you (and only you) to view extra notes about each slide—just in case you forget something!

30. Practice With New Audiences

If possible, try doing a few real live test runs as a webinar or even at a local Toastmasters organization to get some feedback from a live audience.

31. Engage the Audience by Asking Questions

There’s no reason that a presentation should be one-sided. Why not invert the format and ask your audience a question?

To learn how to create a slide that kicks off a Q&A, use this article . These PowerPoint design tips help you create an engaging and exciting discussion.

Helpful Tips to Step Up and Deliver Come Presentation Time

When the actual day arrives, there are only a few last PowerPoint presentation tips and guidelines to keep in mind:

32. Take a Deep Breath

Deep breathing is proven to relieve stress. It’s simple, and it’ll help you remain calm and in the moment, even up to the last minute before starting.

33. Lighten Up Your Mood

Tell yourself a joke or watch a funny video clip. Do this before the presentation, of course. Research concludes that happy people are more productive. More productive is more focused and able to perform better.

34. Remind Yourself to Take It Slow

When we’re stressed or nervous (or both), we tend to speak faster. Consciously, take yet another deep breath and remind yourself to take it slow!

35. Read the Room

Every presentation room has a temperature. It’s your job as a speaker to gauge it and tailor your presentation to it.

Here’s a great example. Layoffs are coming at a company, and you’re asked to speak to an audience. Even if the audience isn’t personally affected by the actions, you’ve got to consider the morale of the workforce.

Skilled speakers have a knack for reading the energy of the room and adjusting their presentation on the fly.

The last thing that group will want to hear is how strong the economy is and why the company is the best place to work. That doesn’t mean that you’ve got to align to their uncertainty, but don’t go too far against the grain while presenting.

Robert Kennedy III is a master of bringing energy and aligning a speech to the audience. Here’s his advice for adjusting:

“It can be hard to wake up a “dead” crowd but go for it. Most of all, don’t take their energy personally. Focus on serving them with every bit of your fiber then leave empty.”

36. Fake It ‘Til You Make It!

Go forward with confidence. If you act confident, you’ll start to feel more confident. Move slowly with grace, speak clearly, smile, wear something nice. You’ll appear confident to all attendees (no matter how you feel internally).

PowerPoint Presentation Tips and Tricks to Help Avoid Mistakes (What Not to Do)

Most importantly, focus on what you can do to make your presentation better. There are a few important things not to do that we’ve got to address. Here are a handful of PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks to help you avoid missteps.

37. Stop With the Sound Effects

Sound effects are distracting and outdated. In most cases, avoid them. Add audio or music to your presentation to inject interest or highlight an important point, but it’s something to take extra care with. If you insert audio, then make sure your use really connects with your audience and has a fresh approach. Otherwise, it’s best to leave it out.

38. Don’t Use Flashy Slide Transitions

Again, this is distracting and outdated. Use transitions and subtle animations in your PowerPoint presentation. But you need to take care and do it right .

39. Beware of Clip Art

This PowerPoint presentation tip shouldn’t even have to be said. But please, please don’t use clip art. Use professional graphics instead.

40. Don’t Be Afraid to Be Afraid

The fear of public speaking is a real one. Many beginners think that if they’re feeling nervous that a presentation won’t go well or succeed. That might lead them to cancel the presentation.

Here’s a tip from expert Sandra Zimmer, who leads The Self-Expression Center on conquering your fears before you take the stage:

“Get out of your head and into your body. I do this through a grounding exercise that really works to calm nerves and bring you present in the moment.”

If you think that public speaking fears aren’t normal, you might never give your award-winning presentation. So don’t be afraid to be afraid, and acknowledge it’s part of the process!

41. Don’t Read Directly During Your PowerPoint Presentation

If you spend your entire presentation looking at the screen or your note cards, you’re sure to lose your audience’s attention. They’ll disengage from what you’re saying, and your presentation will fall flat.

Reading from your paper or screen also makes it look like you’re not prepared. Many people do it, but no one should. As a general rule, only present something you know well and have, at least mostly, memorized the main points of.

42. Don’t Miss Out on PowerPoint Customizations

Many new PowerPoint users often make significant mistakes when using Envato Elements designs.

The best way to see how to make a good presentation PPT is to start with designs from others. That means using a template, but that doesn’t mean you can’t customize them!

Don’t forget that PowerPoint templates are infinitely customizable. Think of them as guides with built-in presentation design tips.

To see more presentation tips that show you what not to do, make sure to check out our guide .

Work in PowerPoint More Effectively (Tips & Tricks to Level Up Your PPT Skills)

These PowerPoint tips will help you get the most out of the application to level up your next presentation. Let’s dive in.

43. Use the Visual Guides

When you’re designing your next PowerPoint presentation, it helps to create a sense of visual rhythm. Slides that have objects aligned and centered are more likely to resonate with an audience.

44. Use a Few Animations (Tastefully)

Animations in effective PowerPoint presentations are a slippery slope. We’ve all sat through presentations where there were so many objects in motion that it was easy to lose focus on the key ideas in the presentation.

But that’s why animations get an unfairly bad reputation. Use animations to create motion and hold an audience’s attention. Use them sparingly and on key elements on your slide, and you’ll capture that attention properly.

45. Stage Key Content With Animations

You just learned that animations should avoid being distracting. But there’s an important principle to using animations properly. It’s called staging content.

Staging content means that the content appears step by step. There’s nothing worse than overwhelming an audience with all your content at once. But when you stage content, bring it on step by step.

Take it from presentation pro Suzannah Baum :

“If you’re sharing a slide with lots of different points on it, using the animation to reveal those points one at a time is a way to keep the presenter’s content flowing smoothly.”

For more animation presentation tips and tricks, follow our guide .

46. Add a Video to Your PowerPoint

When you’re sharing a big idea in your presentation, it helps to share your perspective from a few different angles. Adding a video to supplement your content can do just that. Luckily, it’s easy to add and embed a YouTube video in your next PowerPoint presentation.

47. Add Charts & Graphs

Charts and graphs can help you tell stories with data. It’s easy for an audience to zone out when you throw a big data table or set of statistics at them.

instead, convert those to charts and graphs. Try out our tutorial to learn how to edit those graphs.

48. Build Your Own Infographics With SmartArt

Earlier in this tutorial, we gave you one of my favorite PowerPoint design tips: use infographic templates.

Here’s another. One of my favorite PowerPoint features is SmartArt, which allows you to build infographics right inside the app.

You don’t have to use another graphic design app like Photoshop or Illustrator to add visuals. Instead, try out SmartArt to help you build graphics that are easy to update.

49. Use Presenter View

Remember that when you use the PowerPoint, you’ re the presentation. The slides are just there to reinforce what you’ve got to say and support your speaking points.

That’s why I always recommend using Presenter view. More often than not, you’re going to have several displays. Presenter view shows your content on your screen, while your presentation is displayed on another screen.

50. Track Your PowerPoint Changes

One of my favorite PowerPoint design tips is to collaborate. Those who know you best will suggest compelling changes that are sure to help you succeed.

As you start collaborating on your presentation, it helps to keep track of proposed and included PowerPoint changes. Use this article to track changes made by others.

10 More Advanced PowerPoint Tips & Tricks

Really need to wow an audience with a good PowerPoint presentation? Give these tips a try to make an unforgettable impression:

51. Engage With an Interactive Quiz

A good PowerPoint presentation gets your audience involved. One of the best PowerPoint tricks is to do that with a quiz. By engaging audiences, a quiz makes your slides memorable.

By adding trivia, you’ll see how to present a PowerPoint in a way that people will love. Channel your inner game-show host today. MIDTEST is a  good PowerPoint presentation  with quiz slides.

52. Illustrate With Custom Image Masks

One of the top PowerPoint tips is to illustrate your slides. But you can go beyond simple, rectangular images on each slide.

The Burte template is full of  PowerPoint tricks , including custom image masks. Image masks shape photos into unique works of art. And thanks to premium templates, you can style photos just like this. Masks overlay your photos onto geometric shapes, instantly elevating your style.

53. Print Handouts With Extra Notes

Wonder how to give a good presentation PPT that audiences will remember? Give them a piece of it to take home.

PowerPoint makes it easy to print handouts with room for notes on the page. This way, audiences can keep copies of your slides, along with their own notes. This is the perfect way to ensure everyone engages with and retains your content.

54. Make Bulk Edits With Master Slides

When you think about how to present a PowerPoint, consider your branding. That means keeping your logo front and center in the eyes of an audience. But if you’re working with a lengthy slide deck, this could seem daunting.

That’s where master slides come in. They’re common in premium layouts, and they’re a leading example of presentation skills for PPT. Master slides let you make bulk edits fast.

55. Shrink File Sizes for Sharing

Many of the top presentation tips involve making your slides more accessible. Often, that involves sharing them with audiences online.

You’ll often find that email clients and cloud services limit the size of files that you share. This can be a problem with large PPT slide decks. But there are a few quick steps you can take to reduce PPT file size. Cut graphics, scale down photos, and more.

56. Map Processes With Flowcharts

As you consider how to do a good PowerPoint presentation, think of ease of understanding. After all, you’re trying to explain something to your audience.

The  Flowcharts in Infographics  template seamlessly illustrates ideas and processes. A flowchart maps out a process in a visual way. Instead of resorting to endless narration, try a quick illustration like this. It saves you time and effort, and your audience is sure to thank you.

57. Use Brand-Specific Colors

Using presentation skills for PPT helps form an association between your message and branding. There’s no better way to do that than with your brand colors.

PowerPoint makes it easy to change color themes, adding your brand colors and logo to each slide. This is one of the top PowerPoint tricks for marketing presentations.

58. Build Social Media Posts in PPT

A good PowerPoint presentation doesn’t have to be shared through a projector. Use the app and templates to build amazing illustrations to use anywhere.

A template like Soffee helps you learn how to present a PowerPoint easily with a pre-built design.

Try using PowerPoint to create social media posts. It helps you engage with your audience, with no need to design custom layouts from scratch.

59. Be Industry-Specific

One of the top presentation tips in 2024 is to be industry-specific. That means avoiding generic layouts and choosing something more customized.

This offers two key advantages. First, you save time by having layouts built for you. Second, you gain design inspiration for your specific topic. Themed templates are truly the best of both worlds.

The Medical and Health template is a good PowerPoint presentation with a set theme.

60. Design for Online (Virtual) Sharing

Last but not least in our list of PowerPoint tips comes virtual presenting. More and more often, slides will be shared with online audiences around the globe.

Why not design your slides for that very purpose? And then learn how to share flawlessly with a global team? It’s one of the top presentation tips for 2024. Embrace it today.

More Great PowerPoint Tutorial Resources

We’ve built a resource for Microsoft PowerPoint that you’re sure to want to try. It includes countless PowerPoint tips and tricks. It’s called How to Use PowerPoint (Ultimate Tutorial Guide) and has all the PowerPoint design tips you need.

Discover More Top PowerPoint Template Designs From Envato Elements for 2024

You’ve just seen our favorite powerful PowerPoint presentation tips and guidelines to help you improve your speaking. We’ve also mentioned Envato Elements, an incredible all-you-can-download source for top PowerPoint designs .

Here are five of the best PowerPoint templates that you can use to create your best presentation yet:

1. Galaxi PowerPoint Template

Blast off to success with the help of this PowerPoint template! Think of the pre-built slide designs as pro PowerPoint design tips. They’re built by professional graphic designers. All the popular and modern slide styles that are perfect for your next presentation. Use Galaxi’s five styles and 30 designs to create a great presentation.

2. Masmax PowerPoint Template

We selected templates for this article that match the PowerPoint tips and tricks provided. Masmax fits the bill perfectly across its 234 unique slide designs. These slide designs are sure to align with the latest in design expectations.

3. STYLE Multipurpose PowerPoint Template V50

Style is subjective, but we can all agree that this template is stunning! The light and airy slide designs are built with fashion-focused designs in mind. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not perfect for most presentations. When learning to present a PowerPoint, remember that templates can be customized to suit your purpose.

4. Peachme Creative PowerPoint Template

Peachme has image-focused slides with splashy designs. The slides are colorful and perfect for a modern presentation. Don’t worry about remembering all the PowerPoint design tips because they’re included in the pre-built slides. Use Peachme’s designs for your presentation today.

5. Buizi Office Building Rent PowerPoint Template

Buizi markets itself as a real estate focused template. It’s ideal for that purpose because of the minimal, image-focused slide designs. But that also makes it a perfect choice for presentations in many fields.

We’ve just scratched the surface of PowerPoint design tips with these five options. Here are many more, bundled inside of the best roundups on Envato Tuts+:

How to Build a Good PowerPoint Presentation Quickly (In 2024)

You’ve already seen effective presentation skills PPT techniques. But you may be wondering exactly how to do a good PowerPoint presentation. It only takes a few clicks. Let’s learn how in just five steps.

For this mini-tutorial, we’ll use the Enjoy PowerPoint Template from Envato Elements. You’ll see that it’s a beautiful template that helps you learn how to present a PowerPoint by giving you every object and layout you need.

Let’s get started:

1. Choose Your Slides

As you can see, a template like Enjoy has dozens of unique slides inside. The key to how to give a good presentation PPT is to choose only the slides that you need.

One of the best PowerPoint tricks is to start by selecting slides you wish to use from your template.

In PowerPoint, scroll through the sidebar on the left to view different slide layouts. Right-click and choose Delete to remove unwanted designs. Plus, you can click and drag slide thumbnails to reorder them in the deck.

2. Add Text

Consider how to do a good PowerPoint presentation without investing a ton of time. That’s where premium templates come in.

One of our top presentation tips when working with a PPT is to lean on the pre-built text boxes for your content.

To add custom text, simply click and select the contents of any text box on your slide. Then, type in your own words. Repeat as needed throughout your slide deck.

3. Customize Fonts

With text selected, it’s easy to customize fonts on each slide. Find the Font section on PowerPoint’s Home tab. From there, you’ve got a variety of dropdown options.

Another of our top tips for presentation tricks is to use a custom font setting in your template.

Click to change the font, font size, and more. You can also use the buttons on the left to add bolds, italics, and more.

Need more custom font styles? As an Envato Elements subscriber, you’ve got instant access to thousands of custom fonts . Use them in your presentation with ease.

4. Insert Images

Slides like this one contain an image placeholder. That’s another advantage found only with premium templates. These make adding images a breeze.

Add images to your PPTX template for more visually interesting slides.

To get started, find an image file stored on your computer. Then, drag and drop it over the placeholder. PowerPoint will import it, sized and scaled for a perfect fit.

5. Change Colors

One of the top effective presentation skills is changing shape colors. This helps you control the look and feel of each slide.

With a shape selected, find the Shape Format tab on PowerPoint’s ribbon. Then, click on the Shape Fill dropdown. You’ll see a color chooser menu appear. Click on any thumbnail to apply it to the shape or browse through the Gradient and Texture options.

Start Putting These PowerPoint Presentation Tips & Tricks Into Use Today!

Learning to write, design, and present a PowerPoint presentation is an invaluable skill, no matter where you use it. If you’re a good communicator of important messages, you’ll never go hungry.

Luckily, improving PowerPoint presentations isn’t as hard as it seems. Follow these tips for PowerPoint presentations to design and deliver with greater confidence.

Remember: Less is more (effective) . Use PowerPoint presentation templates for better design and more effective visual impact. And you can customize a PPT template quickly , with the right workflow.

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• How to make Powerpoint slides look more professional: 16 design tips

Greetings, office peeps! When you’re designing a Powerpoint presentation or Word document, do you ever feel like something doesn’t look right? You can’t put your finger on it. Somehow the page looks amateur instead of professional. If you don’t have a designer friend to advise you, or enough time to hire a pro, these DIY design tips can help. Small tweaks will make your page layouts and Powerpoint presentations look more professional.

1. Gather all the content before you start

Have your text written and any crucial pictures and graphs in a folder, collected before you start designing. Then, like with a moving truck full of furniture, you can simply unpack it and place it around the room. You don’t want somebody showing up with a surprise piano halfway through! You can always add non-essential decorative elements later, but make sure you’ve got all the key ingredients before you start arranging content.

2. Begin with the longest slide

If you’re making a multi-page document, design the page or slide that has the most text first. Use this page as a starting template for the rest of your pages. Then you’ll never run out of room on a page later. You’ll already have planned for the most stuff that needs to fit. If some pages end up with extra white space, great! You can make a picture bigger or just leave some breathing room. (More on that in a sec.)

3. Set healthy margins

A common mistake is skinny margins. Placing items too close to the edges of your document creates uneasy tension. Like a glass on the edge of table near a toddler or a cat.

Pull your content away from the edges, and your page will look more professional. If needed, scale down fonts and pictures, or move some elements to the next slide.

4. Make a visual hierarchy

Where do you want people to look first? Interesting layouts have a clear focal point, where one item is bigger or louder than everything else. A main image could be the star, or big text could be the star. If everything in your layout commands the same attention, the page is boring and our eyes don’t know where to land. Layouts that have a nice mix look more dynamic: a main big thing, some medium things, and some small things.

5. Leave empty space

Unless it’s a dense report or a novel, filling every bit of white space feels crowded and daunting to readers. Aim to leave a quarter of your page empty. You might need to ruthlessly cut some content, shrink pictures, or use more pages. If it’s a presentation, see if you can boil your points down to a short phrase each. The examples below show pages that need to be readable on their own, like a brochure. If you’re presenting live, use just a few lines or points per slide.

6. Align what you can

Our eyes move through layouts by following edges—edges of paragraphs, boxes, lines, etc. Make it easy for readers to move through your layout by keeping essential elements organized in rows and columns.

7. When in doubt, left align text

Centering lengthy copy looks messy. Those ragged edges mean each line begins in a different place. Our eyes have to do more work to find the start of each row. This is fine when you have only three or four short lines of text, but not when you have more than that. In that case, left alignment is better.

8. Avoid orphans

In typography, an orphan is a sad little word that ends up on a line all by itself at the bottom of a paragraph. They are not cute! Look after those little babies and give them a family. Type some soft returns (shift+enter) to break lines at better places, pushing another word or two down to keep your orphan company.

9. Avoid rivers

Rivers are awkward trails of vertical space that can show up in justified paragraphs. “Justification” is an option for text alignment, where space is added between words to make the left and right edges of a paragraph line up. Choosing justified alignment is not always wrong, but it’s harder to work with. To fix rivers, you’ll need a generous number of words per line and lots of hyphens, often added manually. This is a hassle. In general, left alignment is a better choice than justification. It prevents unsightly rivers.

10. Avoid long lines of text: target 45-90 characters

Long lines of text are hard to follow across a page. In paragraphs, target 45-90 characters per line, including spaces. Research has shown that readers are more likely to avoid reading text when line lengths don’t fit the optimal range. To fix lines that are too long, use a larger font size, wider page margins, narrower text boxes, or more columns. In general, a landscape slide will need two or more columns of text. A portrait letter will need much wider margins than Word’s default settings.

11. Stick to one or two typefaces

Using too many fonts can look chaotic. Choosing just one typeface (a.k.a. family of fonts) and using different weights is nice. For example, use bold headings with regular-weight paragraph text. Or, pick a font from two different families, using one for headlines and one for paragraphs. Make sure they’re noticeably different from each other, so it doesn’t look like an accident.

A reliable combination is pairing a serif font with a sans serif font. (If you just said, “what the what?” serifs are the little feet on some styles of letters. “Sans serif” means without the feet.) See examples below that use free Google Fonts .

12. Use limited colors

To keep your life simple, choose one main color for your design. If you like, add one or two accent colors in smaller amounts. Repeat those accents so they look intentional, not like random one-offs.

13. Use icons instead of bullets

Icons are more interesting than bullets. If your page needs to look more engaging, swap in small icons instead of bullets to add interest and color. Links to free icon sources are below.

14. Use matching icons

It’s easy to get carried away searching for the icon subject matter you need, and then forget to consider the style of the icon. Does it look like the same artist drew all the icons in your document? It should. Consistency is key to professional design. Icon styles can be solid or outlined with thin or thick lines. They can have rounded corners or sharp ones. They can be smoothly geometric or roughly hand-drawn. Make sure they match! The internet is full of designers you can hire, sets you can purchase, or for freebies, check out:

Reshot free icons — a variety of styles Feather icons — adjust the size, color and stroke thickness of 287 icons Font Awesome icons — 2,000+ freebies with 19,000 more for purchase Hand-drawn Goods icons — sets of sketched icons

15. Keep icons small

To help fill a page, it’s tempting to make icons really big. This can look clunky. If your icons don’t have much detail, keep them small, since that’s the purpose they were designed for.

16. Use better illustrations instead of “clip art”

Stock photographs are easy to find (see my list of free sources ) but good, free illustrations are trickier. Some sources of free illustrations are below, or you can purchase stock illustrations or hire an illustrator. Just like icons, make sure all of your illustrations are the same style.

Blush illustrations Humaaans illustrations Storyset illustrations

Be the design star in your office

Often just a few basic tweaks can help designs and Powerpoint presentations look better. Even if you don’t feel like a designer, you’ll be ahead of the pack in your office!

And if your company needs a consistent brand look and feel, instead of every person reinventing the wheel every time, a brand identity designer can help. We use a strategic approach to create a signature theme for your company: colors, fonts, and images in templates that your team can use all the time. No more guessing each time you make a document. If this is something your business could use, let’s talk!

Note: Text in the example images was auto-generated by Corporate Ipsum  for humor. Please do not write this way for real. 🙂 

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Blog > 6 Tips to turn your boring slides into stunning presentations

6 Tips to turn your boring slides into stunning presentations

01.18.22   •  #design #tips #powerpoint.

Recall those conferences or meetings where you were forced to sit through slide after slide of hard-to-read and overcrowded text with nebulous or no images. Didn’t you feel claustrophobic or overwhelmed? Now, let’s do a reality check! Even though we all abhor a distracting, boring, and cluttered presentation, when it comes to crafting our own, do we really ace it? Well, most of us fail to prepare winning slides despite putting in lots of effort and investing tons of hours. Do you know that you don’t have to be an experienced and professional graphic designer to add a spark to your slideshows? Yes, you heard it right! You can make your monotonous slides dazzle with just a few easy tips. So, let's take a bit of a deeper dive into the blog!

1. Structure and Organize Your Presentation Aptly

According to research studies, the information presented in a structured format is retained 40% more accurately by the audience than unstructured information. Craft your presentation in a simple and logical way so that you can stay on topic while presenting, and your audience can easily grab the key message. The structure of your presentation depends on several factors, such as the settings where you will be delivering your speech, whether you need any visual assistance, how knowledgeable your audience is on the given subject, etc.

• What is the objective of your presentation?
• Who is your audience?
• What key message do you want your audience to take home?

Pro Tip: You can choose pre-designed PowerPoint templates to give a logical flow to the information and a professional touch to the overall presentation.

2. Less is more

Many presenters put everything they know about the topic on the slides for the sake of making the presentation information-rich. But the truth is, too much information in the form of bullet points or long paragraphs will only make your slides look cluttered and difficult to comprehend, drifting off the audience in a few minutes. Keep in mind that the audience is more likely to be enlightened, engaged, and influenced if you provide them meaningful information with fewer words.

• Slides stuffed with too many images do more harm than good to your presentations. If you need to include multiple images, rather than putting them all in one slide, put one on each side.
• Use the fewest characters and words on slides to tell your story. Provide handouts or do follow-up emails if you want to furnish longer information.
• Keep titles and subtitles short.

Pro Tip : Your slides should not be a data/information dump; instead, they must be an aid to support your key points.

3. Power Your Slides with the Right Visuals

You will be surprised to know that the average attention span of humans (8 seconds) is shorter than a goldfish’s (9 seconds). So, to grab their attention really quick and keep them hooked to your slideshow without getting distracted, include the right visuals, and you are all set to deliver a gripping presentation. Moreover, adding visuals save you valuable time compared to writing out a whole bunch of text and increases your credibility as a presenter.

People tend to grab the information quickly and remember it for longer if it is presented in a visually appealing manner. Research also confirms that in comparison to plain text, visuals are processed 60,000 times faster. So, if you really want the linguistically diverse, neuro-diverse, and culturally diverse audience to get more out of your presentation, use high-resolution and good-quality visuals that reinforce and complement the core message. Depending on your presentation, you can include graphs, images, icons, videos, charts, infographics, screenshots, memes, or GIFs.

Pro Tip : Visuals do make a great impact if they are formatted properly, perfectly match with the slide content, and evoke the right emotion.

4. Keep the Formatting (Color and Font) Simple Yet Engaging

Your presentation acts as an ambassador of your brand. Misaligned text boxes, wrong line spacing, and other formatting mistakes may undermine your key message. In a nutshell, a poorly-formatted presentation can put your company’s/brand’s reputation at stake. So, take time to format your slides properly and give them a professional touch before you present them in front of the intended audience.

• Leave adequate white space around the text to give it clarity and an uncramped look. But refrain from double spacing errors.
• Use the right size and color of fonts to improve the readability of the content. Avoid using multiple font colors.
• For increasing comprehension, use contrasting color palettes for text and background.
• Keep the design consistent in all the slides.

5. Make it Audience-Centered and Interactive

• Include only relevant and meaningful points.
• Avoid using jargon or technical language.
• Add a title to each slide to make your audience understand what the slide is all about.
• Make your slides interactive by adding questions, polls, surprising facts, and other icebreaking elements to keep the audience active.
• Allow the audience to ask questions and share their feedback to increase their participation and make your presentation a two-way communication.

6. Include a powerful Call-to-Action

End your presentation with an effective call-to-action (CTA) that guides the audience about what to do with the information you have shared and encourages them to take the right action.

• Choose the CTA that closely matches the purpose/objective of your presentation.
• The CTA should not be complicated and confusing; it should be concise and clear. For example, “Download Now,” “Subscribe Today,” etc.
• If you want to elicit a strong response from the audience, your CTA must be enthusiastic. For example, “plan your dream vacation today,” “buy now and get 60% off,” etc.

The bottom Line

The above tips will help you create a truly amazing presentation, but you can achieve success only if you deliver it with confidence. It is important to prepare thoroughly and practice a lot to deliver a unique experience to the audience. In addition, to avoid your slideshow from being a “snoozefest,” make your narration exciting and lively. Also, make sure you speak neither too slow nor too fast/loud.

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About the author.

Ashish Arora

Ashish Arora is the Co-Founder of SketchBubble.com , a leading provider of result-driven, professionally built presentation templates. Travelling the world to gather new creative ideas, he has been working in the digital marketing space since 2007 and has a passion for designing presentations. You can also find him on Twitter or LinkedIn .

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15 PowerPoint Tips to Make Your Slides More Effective

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Paulina Fox See full bio →

People often underestimate the power of a well-designed and effective PowerPoint presentation. Although everyone has heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” in PPT land, the opposite seems to hold true.

As slides usually contain an overwhelming amount of text, which the presenter often reads out loud, PowerPoint’s reputation for being dusty and static is starting to make sense, isn’t it? 

In truth, well-designed PowerPoint slides that balance text with other elements are much better at delivering the message to your audience. 

We interviewed PPT expert Ferry Pereboom and compiled his insights into 15 PowerPoint tips and tricks to help you create engaging presentations. Here’s a quick rundown of the tips we’ll cover, which you can use as a checklist to ensure your presentations are on track once you have an idea of what they entail:

Now, let’s explore these tips in more detail.

The text should only complement your speech and emphasize its key points. After all, overfilling your PPT presentation with text can only result in two things:

• Presenters will read everything in the slides, creating a snoozefest for the attendees.
• Attendees will read the text on the screen instead of listening to you.

Remember, PowerPoint presentations should be, above all things, a visual aid. So, cramming a truckload of information into your slide shows makes no sense. That makes it especially important to focus on the content of the text.

With that in mind, here are some best practices for adding high-quality text to your PPTs.

1. Keep it short and to the point

As previously stated, it’s important to remember that a PowerPoint presentation should complement your speech. Avoid putting the entire text on the slides, as your audience prefers listening rather than reading what you intend to say.

Whether you use complimentary texts or bullet points, make sure to keep them short and sweet. For reference, you can follow the 5×5 rule: have up to 5 text lines on each slide, each with no more than 5 words per line.

That way, your audience will direct their attention to you instead of the screen.

7. Select relevant, adequate visuals

There isn’t only one way to add imagery to your PowerPoint presentations. That said, you should consider the context to ensure the images you choose are adequate for the audience. 

For instance, you can use memes and jokes to break the ice or explain your ideas to people when participating in a less formal event. But we don’t recommend adding jokes to a presentation on financial year results. 

Beyond that, stay consistent. Using different image styles throughout the same presentation can be distracting to your audience, and the same applies to images of varying quality.

Always opt for high-quality images that support your message to create a solid presentation.

You can also use SmartArt, a built-in tool that lets you create infographics in the PPT app. SmartArt includes a wide variety of templates, such as cycles, hierarchies, relationships, and pyramids. For example, you can use SmartArt to replace simple bullet points with more visually appealing elements.

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Paulina Fox

Passionate about design and tech, Paulina crafts content that helps customers delve deeper into iSpring products.

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More From Forbes

5 design hacks to make your presentations less ugly.

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By Allison Goldberg

Communication took a hit in 2020. One could create a very dangerous drinking game solely using the phrases “you’re still on mute,” “can you see my screen”, and “here’s how you remove the cat filter.” 

But while the ways in which verbal communication has drastically shifted are often discussed, something less often talked about are the ways in which visual presentation has morphed in our remote world. Now that we're in the same space everyday, fresh visuals are more important than ever in captivating a virtual audience. And so I sat down with designer Adam Fox of The Retail Refinery to discuss how to design presentations for maximum effect in 2021 and beyond, as hybrid workspaces inevitably become our new normal.

Allison Goldberg: What is the new role that design plays when creating a presentation in 2021?

Adam Fox: I would argue that design has only become more critical, because it's even more difficult to capture the attention of an audience when you're stuck inside a tiny box on Zoom. The audience can't engage with you in the same way they would in person, and likewise, the presenter can't interact like they normally would with the slides. As a result, eye-catching colors, graphics, and animation play an even bigger role in keeping people tuned in to what you're saying.

Everyone is staring at screens nonstop nowadays. How can one stand out?

Goldberg: Okay, but what if you're not exactly the artistic type?

Fox: You should always consider the importance of the presentation. If it's a major company meeting or a pitch deck to get VC funding or new clients, do you really want to leave anything on the table? A professionally designed presentation that looks like a million bucks not only grabs the eye, but also plays a key role in how the information it contains is absorbed by the audience. But for your everyday internal presentations, you certainly don't need to be an expert. There are tons of simple tricks that anyone can use to improve their presentations.

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Goldberg: Let’s say we’re sitting down with a blank PPT. Where do we start?

Fox: Well, for starters, you need to consider layout. The layout of the slide guides the eye to through the information and tells a story. 

One way to achieve a solid layout is by following a fundamental tenet of design—the rule of thirds. Just divide the slide into a 3-by-3 grid (which you can literally do by turning on the vertical and horizontal guides in PowerPoint, Google Slides, or whatever you choose to build presentations) and ensure that key pieces of text and graphics roughly align with the intersection points of the grid. This may seem like a strange exercise at first, but applying this concept forces the eye to move around a slide and engage with the information on it.

Goldberg: The Rule of Threes exists in writing and in comedy, so I love that it translates visually, as well. Let’s dive into content. Normally, as a presentation coach, we talk a ton about how to move between moments and how your body language, verbal cues, and/or intentional silence can add so much finesse. How can visual elements help achieve this as well? 

Fox: Most people ignore the concept of animating elements on the slide because they think it's too time intensive or looks cheesy. But using the right animations can add value. For example, the typical static slide reveals all of the information up front, so people will naturally begin reading bullet points or analyzing charts well before the speaker gets to that point of the presentation.

In order to keep the audience focused on what is being said (and maintain a healthy dose of suspense), you should reveal information on a slide as it is discussed instead of all at once. PowerPoint has a new-ish morph transition feature that accomplishes this nicely with minimal effort. It basically interpolates super smooth animation paths based on the starting and ending positions of each object on a slide. In addition to unveiling talking points one-by-one, this can also be used to grow the bar on a bar graph or draw attention to important words or numbers by literally highlighting them in real time.

Use the morph feature to let shapes shift.

Goldberg: At GoldJam Creative, we’re always coaching people not to put too much on their slides because the audience will inevitably start reading and stop listening. But I know that sometimes the information just needs to be there. What tips do you have for managing slide content from a visual perspective?

Fox: To help prevent the presentation from quickly devolving into an eye-assaulting mess, keep the number of fonts down to just one (preferably Sans Serif since they tend to be more legible) and colors to a maximum of three using the 60-30-10 rule. Basically, a presentation should contain a dominant color (60%), secondary color (30%), and accent color (10%). The easiest way to achieve this is by using one of dozens of online color palette generators ( Adobe Color is a great one—and it's free!). A lot of times I like doing everything in grayscale and using a vibrant pop color to draw attention to key pieces of information.

Goldberg: And last but not least, what’s one of the biggest amateur moves that you see that you wish everyone would stop doing?

Fox: Bullet points! Bulleted lists are overused, unhelpful, and way too wordy. You might as well give your audience an Ambien. Instead, keep each slide limited to a single idea or concept. It can be an image, a graph, or even just a number or word rendered in a visually impactful display typeface. Think of each slide as a brick for building a narrative incrementally in easily digestible, bite-sized portions. Remember: it takes just as much time to cram a ton of stuff on a slide as it does to split up that same information on several slides.

For more tips from Adam, check out his work at theretailrefinery.com .

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17 PowerPoint Presentation Tips From Pro Presenters [+ Templates]

Published: April 26, 2024

PowerPoint presentations can be professional, attractive, and really help your audience remember your message.

If you don’t have much experience, that’s okay — I’m going to arm you with PowerPoint design tips from pro presenters, the steps you need to build an engaging deck, and templates to help you nail great slide design.

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Buckle up for a variety of step-by-step explanations as well as tips and tricks to help you start mastering this program. There are additional resources woven in, and you’ll find expert perspectives from other HubSpotters along the way.

Table of Contents

How to Make a PowerPoint Presentation

Powerpoint presentation tips.

Microsoft PowerPoint is like a test of basic professional skills, and each PowerPoint is basically a presentation made of multiple slides.

Successful PowerPoints depend on three main factors: your command of PowerPoint's design tools, your attention to presentation processes, and being consistent with your style.

Keep those in mind as we jump into PowerPoint's capabilities.

Getting Started

1. open powerpoint and click ‘new.’.

A page with templates will usually open automatically, but if not, go to the top left pane of your screen and click New . If you’ve already created a presentation, select Open and then double-click the icon to open the existing file.

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Creating PowerPoint Slides

3. insert a slide..

Insert a new slide by clicking on the Home tab and then the New Slide button. Consider what content you want to put on the slide, including heading, text, and imagery.

• Finally, PowerPoint Live is a new tool that enables you to do more seamless presentations during video calls and may be a better overall match for doing presentations remotely. Check out this video:

11. Try Using GIFs.

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15. Embed multimedia.

PowerPoint allows you to either link to video/audio files externally or to embed the media directly in your presentation. For PCs, two great reasons for embedding are:

• Embedding allows you to play media directly in your presentation. It will look much more professional than switching between windows.
• Embedding also means that the file stays within the PowerPoint presentation, so it should play normally without extra work (except on a Mac).

If you use PowerPoint for Mac it gets a bit complicated, but it can be done:

• Always bring the video and/or audio file with you in the same folder as the PowerPoint presentation.
• Only insert video or audio files once the presentation and the containing folder have been saved on a portable drive in their permanent folder.
• If the presentation will be played on a Windows computer, then Mac users need to make sure their multimedia files are in WMV format.
• Consider using the same operating system for designing and presenting, no matter what.

16. Bring your own hardware.

Between operating systems, PowerPoint is still a bit jumpy. Even between differing PPT versions, things can change. The easiest fix? Just bring along your own laptop when you're presenting.

The next easiest fix is to upload your PowerPoint presentation into Google Slides as a backup option — just make sure there is a good internet connection and a browser available where you plan to present.

Google Slides is a cloud-based presentation software that will show up the same way on all operating systems.

To import your PowerPoint presentation into Google Slides:

• Navigate to slides.google.com . Make sure you’re signed in to a Google account (preferably your own).
• Under Start a new presentation , click the empty box with a plus sign. This will open up a blank presentation.
• Go to File , then Import slides .
• A dialog box will come up. Tap Upload.
• Click Select a file from your device .
• Select your presentation and click Open .
• Select the slides you’d like to import. If you want to import all of them, click All in the upper right-hand corner of the dialog box.
• Click Import slides.

When I tested this out, Google Slides imported everything perfectly, including a shape whose points I had manipulated. This is a good backup option to have if you’ll be presenting across different operating systems.

17. Use Presenter View.

In most presentation situations, there will be both a presenter’s screen and the main projected display for your presentation.

PowerPoint has a great tool called Presenter View, which can be found in the Slide Show tab of PowerPoint. Included in the Presenter View is an area for notes, a timer/clock, and a presentation display.

For many presenters, this tool can help unify their spoken presentation and their visual aid. You never want to make the PowerPoint seem like a stack of notes that you’re reading off of.

Use the Presenter View option to help create a more natural presentation.

Pro Tip: At the start of the presentation, you should also hit CTRL + H to make the cursor disappear. Hitting the “A” key will bring it back if you need it.

Your Next Great PowerPoint Presentation Starts Here

Now that you have these style, design, and presentation tips under your belt, you should feel confident to create your PowerPoint presentation.

But if you can explore other resources to make sure your content hits the mark. After all, you need a strong presentation to land your point and make an impression.

With several templates to choose from — both in PowerPoint and available for free download — you can swiftly be on your way to creating presentations that wow your audiences.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in September 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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9 Tips for Making Beautiful PowerPoint Presentations

Ready to craft a beautiful powerpoint presentation these nine powerpoint layout ideas will help anyone create effective, compelling slides..

How many times have you sat through a poorly designed business presentation that was dull, cluttered, and distracting? Probably way too many. Even though we all loathe a boring presentation, when it comes time to make our own, do we really do any better?

The good news is you don’t have to be a professional designer to make professional presentations. We’ve put together a few simple guidelines you can follow to create a beautifully assembled deck.

We’ll walk you through some slide design tips, show you some tricks to maximize your PowerPoint skills, and give you everything you need to look really good next time you’re up in front of a crowd.

And, while PowerPoint remains one of the biggest names in presentation software, many of these design elements and principles work in Google Slides as well.

Let’s dive right in and make sure your audience isn’t yawning through your entire presentation.

1. Use Layout to Your Advantage

Layout is one of the most powerful visual elements in design, and it’s a simple, effective way to control the flow and visual hierarchy of information.

For example, most Western languages read left to right, top to bottom. Knowing this natural reading order, you can direct people’s eyes in a deliberate way to certain key parts of a slide that you want to emphasize.

You can also guide your audience with simple tweaks to the layout. Use text size and alternating fonts or colors to distinguish headlines from body text.

Placement also matters. There are many unorthodox ways to structure a slide, but most audience members will have to take a few beats to organize the information in their head—that’s precious time better spent listening to your delivery and retaining information.

Try to structure your slides more like this:

And not like this:

Layout is one of the trickier PowerPoint design concepts to master, which is why we have these free PowerPoint templates already laid out for you. Use them as a jumping off point for your own presentation, or use them wholesale!

Presentation templates can give you a huge leg up as you start working on your design.

2. No Sentences

This is one of the most critical slide design tips. Slides are simplified, visual notecards that capture and reinforce main ideas, not complete thoughts.

As the speaker, you should be delivering most of the content and information, not putting it all on the slides for everyone to read (and probably ignore). If your audience is reading your presentation instead of listening to you deliver it, your message has lost its effectiveness.

Pare down your core message and use keywords to convey it. Try to avoid complete sentences unless you’re quoting someone or something.

Stick with this:

And avoid this:

3. Follow the 6×6 Rule

One of the cardinal sins of a bad PowerPoint is cramming too many details and ideas on one slide, which makes it difficult for people to retain information. Leaving lots of “white space” on a slide helps people focus on your key points.

Try using the 6×6 rule to keep your content concise and clean looking. The 6×6 rule means a maximum of six bullet points per slide and six words per bullet. In fact, some people even say you should never have more than six words per slide!

Just watch out for “orphans” (when the last word of a sentence/phrase spills over to the next line). This looks cluttered. Either fit it onto one line or add another word to the second line.

Slides should never have this much information:

4. Keep the Colors Simple

Stick to simple light and dark colors and a defined color palette for visual consistency. Exceptionally bright text can cause eye fatigue, so use those colors sparingly. Dark text on a light background or light text on a dark background will work well. Also avoid intense gradients, which can make text hard to read.

If you’re presenting on behalf of your brand, check what your company’s brand guidelines are. Companies often have a primary brand color and a secondary brand color , and it’s a good idea to use them in your presentation to align with your company’s brand identity and style.

If you’re looking for color inspiration for your next presentation, check out our 101 Color Combinations , where you can browse tons of eye-catching color palettes curated by a pro. When you find the one you like, just type the corresponding color code into your presentation formatting tools.

Here are more of our favorite free color palettes for presentations:

• 10 Color Palettes to Nail Your Next Presentation
• 10 Energizing Sports Color Palettes for Branding and Marketing
• 10 Vintage Color Palettes Inspired by the Decades

No matter what color palette or combination you choose, you want to keep the colors of your PowerPoint presentation simple and easy to read, like this:

Stay away from color combinations like this:

5. Use Sans-Serif Fonts

Traditionally, serif fonts (Times New Roman, Garamond, Bookman) are best for printed pages, and sans-serif fonts (Helvetica, Tahoma, Verdana) are easier to read on screens.

These are always safe choices, but if you’d like to add some more typographic personality , try exploring our roundup of the internet’s best free fonts . You’ll find everything from classic serifs and sans serifs to sophisticated modern fonts and splashy display fonts. Just keep legibility top of mind when you’re making your pick.

Try to stick with one font, or choose two at the most. Fonts have very different personalities and emotional impacts, so make sure your font matches the tone, purpose, and content of your presentation.

6. Stick to 30pt Font or Larger

Many experts agree that your font size for a PowerPoint presentation should be at least 30pt. Sticking to this guideline ensures your text is readable. It also forces you, due to space limitations, to explain your message efficiently and include only the most important points. .

7. Avoid Overstyling the Text

Three of the easiest and most effective ways to draw attention to text are:

• A change in color

Our eyes are naturally drawn to things that stand out, but use these changes sparingly. Overstyling can make the slide look busy and distracting.

8. Choose the Right Images

The images you choose for your presentation are perhaps as important as the message. You want images that not only support the message, but also elevate it—a rare accomplishment in the often dry world of PowerPoint.

But, what is the right image? We’ll be honest. There’s no direct answer to this conceptual, almost mystical subject, but we can break down some strategies for approaching image selection that will help you curate your next presentation.

The ideal presentation images are:

• Inspirational

These may seem like vague qualities, but the general idea is to go beyond the literal. Think about the symbols in an image and the story they tell. Think about the colors and composition in an image and the distinct mood they set for your presentation.

With this approach, you can get creative in your hunt for relatable, authentic, and inspirational images. Here are some more handy guidelines for choosing great images.

Illustrative, Not Generic

So, the slide in question is about collaborating as a team. Naturally, you look for images of people meeting in a boardroom, right?

While it’s perfectly fine to go super literal, sometimes these images fall flat—what’s literal doesn’t necessarily connect to your audience emotionally. Will they really respond to generic images of people who aren’t them meeting in a boardroom?

In the absence of a photo of your actual team—or any other image that directly illustrates the subject at hand—look for images of convincing realism and humanity that capture the idea of your message.

Doing so connects with viewers, allowing them to connect with your message.

The image above can be interpreted in many ways. But, when we apply it to slide layout ideas about collaboration, the meaning is clear.

It doesn’t hurt that there’s a nice setting and good photography, to boot.

Supportive, Not Distracting

Now that we’ve told you to get creative with your image selection, the next lesson is to rein that in. While there are infinite choices of imagery out there, there’s a limit to what makes sense in your presentation.

Let’s say you’re giving an IT presentation to new employees. You might think that image of two dogs snuggling by a fire is relatable, authentic, and inspirational, but does it really say “data management” to your audience?

To find the best supporting images, try searching terms on the periphery of your actual message. You’ll find images that complement your message rather than distract from it.

In the IT presentation example, instead of “data connections” or another literal term, try the closely related “traffic” or “connectivity.” This will bring up images outside of tech, but relative to the idea of how things move.

Inspiring and Engaging

There’s a widespread misconception that business presentations are just about delivering information. Well, they’re not. In fact, a great presentation is inspirational. We don’t mean that your audience should be itching to paint a masterpiece when they’re done. In this case, inspiration is about engagement.

Is your audience asking themselves questions? Are they coming up with new ideas? Are they remembering key information to tap into later? You’ll drive a lot of this engagement with your actual delivery, but unexpected images can play a role, as well.

When you use more abstract or aspirational images, your audience will have room to make their own connections. This not only means they’re paying attention, but they’re also engaging with and retaining your message.

To find the right abstract or unconventional imagery, search terms related to the tone of the presentation. This may include images with different perspectives like overhead shots and aerials, long exposures taken over a period of time, nature photos , colorful markets , and so on.

The big idea here is akin to including an image of your adorable dog making a goofy face at the end of an earnings meeting. It leaves an audience with a good, human feeling after you just packed their brains with data.

Use that concept of pleasant surprise when you’re selecting images for your presentation.

9. Editing PowerPoint Images

Setting appropriate image resolution in powerpoint.

Though you can drag-and-drop images into PowerPoint, you can control the resolution displayed within the file. All of your PowerPoint slide layout ideas should get the same treatment to be equal in size.

Simply click File > Compress Pictures in the main application menu.

If your presentation file is big and will only be viewed online, you can take it down to On-screen , then check the Apply to: All pictures in this file , and rest assured the quality will be uniform.

This resolution is probably fine for proofing over email, but too low for your presentation layout ideas. For higher res in printed form, try the Print setting, which at 220 PPI is extremely good quality.

For large-screens such as projection, use the HD setting, since enlarging to that scale will show any deficiencies in resolution. Low resolution can not only distract from the message, but it looks low-quality and that reflects on the presenter.

If size is no issue for you, use High Fidelity (maximum PPI), and only reduce if the file size gives your computer problems.

The image quality really begins when you add the images to the presentation file. Use the highest quality images you can, then let PowerPoint scale the resolution down for you, reducing the excess when set to HD or lower.

Resizing, Editing, and Adding Effects to Images in PowerPoint

PowerPoint comes with an arsenal of tools to work with your images. When a picture is selected, the confusingly named Picture Format menu is activated in the top menu bar, and Format Picture is opened on the right side of the app window.

In the Format Picture menu (on the right) are four sections, and each of these sections expand to show their options by clicking the arrows by the name:

• Fill & Line (paint bucket icon): Contains options for the box’s colors, patterns, gradients, and background fills, along with options for its outline.
• Effects (pentagon icon): Contains Shadow, Reflection, Glow, Soft Edges, 3-D Format and Rotation, and Artistic Effects.
• Size & Properties (dimensional icon): Size, Position, and Text Box allow you to control the physical size and placement of the picture or text boxes.
• Picture (mountain icon): Picture Corrections, Colors, and Transparency give you control over how the image looks. Under Crop, you can change the size of the box containing the picture, instead of the entire picture itself as in Size & Properties above.

The menu at the top is more expansive, containing menu presets for Corrections, Color, Effects, Animation, and a lot more. This section is where you can crop more precisely than just choosing the dimensions from the Picture pane on the right.

Cropping Images in PowerPoint

The simple way to crop an image is to use the Picture pane under the Format Picture menu on the right side of the window. Use the Picture Position controls to move the picture inside its box, or use the Crop position controls to manipulate the box’s dimensions.

To exert more advanced control, or use special shapes, select the picture you want to crop, then click the Picture Format in the top menu to activate it.

Hit the Crop button, then use the controls on the picture’s box to size by eye. Or, click the arrow to show more options, including changing the shape of the box (for more creative looks) and using preset aspect ratios for a more uniform presentation of images.

The next time you design a PowerPoint presentation, remember that simplicity is key and less is more. By adopting these simple slide design tips, you’ll deliver a clear, powerful visual message to your audience.

If you want to go with a PowerPoint alternative instead, you can use Shutterstock Create to easily craft convincing, engaging, and informative presentations.

With many presentation template designs, you’ll be sure to find something that is a perfect fit for your next corporate presentation. You can download your designs as a .pdf file and import them into both PowerPoint and Google Slides presentation decks.

Take Your PowerPoint Presentation to the Next Level with Shutterstock Flex

Need authentic, eye-catching photography to form the foundation of your PowerPoint presentation? We’ve got you covered.

With Shutterstock Flex, you’ll have all-in-one access to our massive library, plus the FLEXibility you need to select the perfect mix of assets every time.

License this cover image via F8 studio and Ryan DeBerardinis .

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Why Your Business PowerPoint Presentation Needs White Space

The US has had a tough winter, especially in the North East. Many cities are buried under mounds of snow and frankly, are running out of places to put the piles of white stuff.

The designers at eSlide have an idea – it should go into your slides. Of course we don’t mean snow…we mean white space in your business PowerPoint presentation.

White space is the empty (or negative) space on your slides. It doesn’t really have to be white, but it does have to be there. In fact, it’s an integral component of any presentation design, guiding the viewer’s gaze and their attention as the story unfolds.

Rather than being considered “the unused part” of a slide, white space should be an intentional addition, helping you to emphasize the points you want to make.

Defining White Space

White space includes any empty space on your slides, i.e., above, below, around and in between elements. These spaces can be split into two groups: active and passive.

Examples of passive white space include margins or the spaces in between lines of text. This space occurs naturally and simply helps to prevent information overload. Active white space occurs intentionally, and is used as a design element to create distinction and hierarchy between elements, drawing attention to what’s important.

One-Topic-Per-Slide

It’s easy to default to putting everything you want to say and show on every slide, resulting in a crowded and often confusing business PowerPoint presentation. Resist the temptation.

It’s best if you stick to the one-topic-per-slide rule. That doesn’t mean just one point or chart per page…of course your slides need to contain sufficient points to be meaningful. But overcrowding your slides with multiple topics will mean less white space and therefore less clarity. Cognitive Load Theory shows that it is better to have more slides with good white space than fewer, denser slides. See a great summary article here .

It’s important to evaluate every item you want to include on each slide. Ask yourself: does adding this make my slide more effective? If the answer is ‘no’ or even ‘maybe’ – get rid of it.

An Air of Authority

White space will give you and your presentations an air of authority. Think of the one-image-no-text slide formula that Steve Jobs was famous for. Those slides reinforced his image of being the smartest man in the room because he wasn’t afraid to keep his words off the slides and trust himself to tell his audience what he wanted them to know.

In this article, “ 11 Presentation Lessons You Can Still Learn From Steve Jobs ”, author and Forbes Columnist Carmine Gallo notes, “In the first three minutes of Steve Jobs’ famous iPhone presentation, he uses a grand total of 19 words (21 if you include dates). Those words are also distributed across about 12 slides.”

Don’t be afraid to use white space as Jobs did. If he had filled his slides with lists of iPhone features, his audience would have been reading rather than listening. When you are giving your business PowerPoint presentation, you are the authority in the room. White space is not wasted space; its space that’s helping you speak with authority. So don’t waste your moment reading from slides that are littered with lists of bullet points.

Help Is at Hand

White space shouldn’t be an afterthought in your business PowerPoint presentation. Instead, make it an important and considered design element right from the start.

If you’re interested in reading more about white space, check out The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type by Alexander W. White. In it, the author quotes an anonymous source who sums up the importance of white space, “Design is not the abundance of simplicity. It is the absence of complexity.”

Learn more by joining one of our design training courses. eSlide’s one-hour S.E.E. Design Training shows you how to use white space and other key design elements to help you create memorable business PowerPoint presentations.

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Better Beamer Presentations the Easy Way

October 01, 2019 9 minute read

Everyone knows that Beamer makes frankly terrible presentations without a good deal of help. A well crafted Beamer presentation can be a thing of beauty, especially since you can use knitr or R Markdown to automatically generate tables and figures, but it takes a lot of work. We all have our own little tricks to do things like get more space between items in a list (ending every \item line with \\~\\ ) and the simple but repetitive tasks we have to do every single slide (opening a \Large environment to make text more readable).

Three little tricks

I finally got tired of all this and decided to waste a lot of time now to save even more time later. To do that, I headed to Stack Exchange and started digging into the Beamer documentation.

Give me some space

We’ll start with the base Beamer class. There are a number of Beamer themes that are much better than the default theme, but I’m going to focus on things we can do to improve even the default theme. Here’s our humble starting point.

The first thing anyone who’s ever taken a graphic design class will tell you is that we need to space out those lines. With them all crammed in the middle, they’re harder to read and there’s ton of empty space up top and down below. We can insert a \vfill at the top and bottom of the slide, and between each line, but this gets old quickly. After plenty of googling and a few less than perfect solutions, I came across this Stack Exchange answer . By adding the following code to your preamble, any items in a \itemize environment will be evenly spaced vertically.

Looking better already!

Super size it

Next we need to enlarge our text to make it easier to read. Again, we can do this manually on every slide, but that’s a giant pain. I found this old thread on latex.org which explains how to redefine the font size of \itemize and \enumerate items.

While this has fixed the font size of our lists, now our still too small equation will look even more out of place. I learned from this Stack Exchange answer that the \[ and \] math mode separators actually call the equation* environment. With this knowledge, I used the etoolbox package’s \BeforeBeginEnvironment and \AfterEndEnvironment commands to change the font size to LARGE for any equation* environments.

Now we’ve got a much more readable slide that will be automatically replicated for every other slide in our presentation. If you have multi-line equations in your slides, you can similarly redefine the align* environment to enlarge these equations as well.

Don’t forget numbers

As we can see above, our redefinition of the \itemize environment also evenly spaces sub-bullets. However, it doesn’t do anything for numbered lists defined with /enumerate as the slide below shows.

To evenly space items in numbered lists, we just need to take the same changes to the \itemize environment we introduced above, and apply them to the \enumerate environment as well. Unfortunately, I’m not nearly fluent enough in TeX to understand what this code does. Luckily, I know how to run a diff . Diffing two files will point out all differences between the two. By comparing the modified code from Stack Exchange with the original in beamerbaselocalstructure.sty , we can figure out which lines have been added and copy them over to Beamer’s definition of the \enumerate environment.

Essentially, the new code redefines the \itemsep length parameter as \vfill and adds a \vfil at the end of an \itemize environment. \vfil and \vfil are both commands to create vertical space, and this Stack Exchange answer explains the difference between them, but I still have no idea what the difference is after reading it. What matters is that the \enumerate environment definition looks identical to the \itemize one in the lines surrounding the new code (with the substitution of \endenumerate for \enditemize ), which makes it easy to add it to this definition as well.

Once we’ve done that, now numbered lists are also evenly spaced!

All together now

Sticking all of the below in your preamble will greatly improve the visual appeal of your slides with zero effort required on each individual slide.

I’ve combined all of the LaTeX code above into a style file called better-beamer.sty available on my GitHub. To avoid having to copy and paste this code into the preamble of every presentation you make, you can just load the style file instead! If you place the style file into the same directory as your .tex file, you just need to add:

If you want to avoid having to copy the style file every time you make a new presentation, you can just use an absolute path to reference it in your .tex document. On my computer, this looks like this:

One caveat if you use R Markdown like I do. R Markdown relies on pandoc to convert from .Rmd to .md to .tex to .pdf (phew). This only matters if you’re a lazy typist like me and write your

When you write your lists in the former format, pandoc redefines \itemsep to 0pt in any list (bulleted or numbered) environment in the the resulting LaTeX code via the following command:

This will cancel out our redefined list environments and get us back our original cramped lines. There’s no way to disable this \tightlist behavior (short of removing it from the source code and compiling pandoc yourself), but it is very easy to neutralize thanks to the info in this Stack Exchange answer . If you’re using R Markdown, simply add the following to your YAML header under the header-includes variable.

This will come after the \tightlist definition in the preamble and redefine it to do nothing, leaving our properly spaced lists intact without having to add an empty line after every item. At some point I’ll post my custom LaTeX template (with other aesthetic improvements) for Beamer slides via R Markdown and talk about my process for modifying the default template.

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7 common powerpoint presentations design mistakes and how to fix them.

We have a look at seven of the most common design mistakes we see in Powerpoint decks, as well as our tricks and tips to get the most out of your presentation.

Don’t forget to [thrive_2step id=’6221′] download [/thrive_2step] our free PowerPoint Checklist, which you can use to help with your next PowerPoint.

1 Alignment

It may seem like an obvious one, but many decks that come to us are improved by using the inbuilt alignment tools in Powerpoint.

Much like the design in a Scandinavian home , or a Braun record player , the careful alignment (and distribution) of objects can go a long way to instilling a feeling of serenity.

Humans respond positively to order, and a precisely aligned slide will imply a firm is operating precisely.

2 Overcrowding

The temptation is often to include as much content on a slide as possible. We get it, you’re proud of your content. But remember your audience; they will be trying to listen to you at the same time as they take in the content of your slide.

Less is more.

At best, a slide should convey one idea. But realistically you could end up with 50 slides. We recommend using three key take aways, limited to bullet points and language that is quick to digest.

We recommend using three key take aways, limited to bullet points and language that is quick to digest.

White space is not an invitation to fill it. Much like the design of an iPhone, there is strength and confidence in minimalism. Don’t be tempted to use that free space for another table, graph or an image.

3. Size 

Your logo is too large. So is your font. So are those images.

One of the first steps we take is to reduce the size of the font and increase the line height. Why? A smaller font (but nothing below 10-12pt) will give the content more space to breathe. The physical space between lines of text makes it easier for the brain to process. This increased physical space creates a greater sense of calm.

According to Emil Ruder’s ‘Typography’ ,  the optimal number of characters per line of text is considered to be between 50 – 75 (including spaces). The subconscious mind is energised when it jumps to a new line but this focus wears off over the course of a line. Keep your lines short, but not too narrow.

However there are two sides to this coin.

Often we see charts where the content is too small to be legible, or where there is no padding in tables. If the chart/table isn’t 100% necessary, then see Step 2, otherwise consider adding some space around the text to give it the space it deserves.

Too few colours and your slides can seem dull. Too many colours and it can be difficult to achieve balance. However, one thing is for sure, you need to use colour.

For much of Dieter Rams’ timeless designs, he stuck to greyscale, using colour very sparingly. The effect is enormously powerful, as a tiny hit of orange or yellow will draw attention to that element.

Bright colours have been proven to be connected to the release of dopamine in the brain, making people feel happier.

The total opposite is true of the highly successful Big Bang Theory, a long running TV Series which subscribes to what we refer to as Jelly Bean Theory . Bright colours have been proven to be connected to the release of dopamine in the brain, making people feel happier. Like tasty sweets, the TV Series uses the same technique to make viewers feel good as they engage.

Both techniques can be used effectively in Pitch Decks. A carefully considered colour palette of blues can be offset with an orange accent, or a very colourful (and harmonious) presentation can feel stimulating and lead to an energised audience.

There are two main questions when it comes to using fonts; “Which font should I use?”, and “How many fonts should I use?”

Unfortunately, the first one is almost moot. While you’re free to use any font you want in Powerpoint, if another person viewing the Deck doesn’t have the same font as you, then Powerpoint will substitute it with whatever font it deems appropriate. Exporting your Powerpoint as a PDF will get around this, but it doesn’t solve the problem if someone in your firm has a different set of fonts.

Because of this, we highly recommend you use a system font. Those are the fonts that come packaged with Windows or Mac by default: Arial, Verdana, Calibri, Times New Roman, etc.

With regards to how many fonts you should use, always remember: three is a crowd. Stick to two fonts.

Your aim should be to promote legibility and create contrast. Combining a serif font (Times New Roman or Georgia for example) with a sans-serif (Arial, Verdana or Tahoma) is often a good combination. The contrast between the two typefaces will be an effective way of making headings stand out.

Inconsistencies can very quickly make a design look untidy.

However, there is something else to take into account. Keep your font selection, colour and size consistent throughout your document. Always use the same sizes for the main headings, and the same for the sub headings. Always use the same for all the body copy. It may sound obvious, but differences in font size, line height or colour will impact hugely on the design. Inconsistencies can very quickly make a design look untidy.

Finally, a little note on justifying. As a rule; always justify-left. To complicate matters further, Powerpoint refers to this as Align-left. Don’t confuse this with the tips in section 1.

There will be times when you need to centre-align text, that’s fine. More infrequently, items may be aligned-right, but resist at all costs the desire to justify the text. It may look neat, but is harder to read and creates uneven spacing and hyphenation.

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

When we researched our article “ 5 Design Trends in Financial Services to Watch in 2017 ”, we found that humans process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.

Whether you choose to use a photo, an icon or a graph, the evidence is clear: a visual accompaniment can drastically improve the efficacy of your slide.

We favour the mantra from section two –  less is more .

Including one powerful visual on your slide can make it particularly memorable, especially a photograph.

Including one powerful visual on your slide can make it particularly memorable, especially a photograph. But the danger with using photography is two-fold; you can run the risk of using an overly staged photo, which makes a presentation feel fake; or you can inadvertently use a copyright protected image which can lead to legal difficulties.

Our advice is to steer clear of photos in favour of icons and custom illustrations. Use known resources like shutterstock, where you can download icon sets . These sets will give you a nice array of choice, while ensuring consistency. At Peregrine we create bespoke icons, as a delicately tailored icon can really enhance a text slide.

7 Consistency

Finally, and most crucially of all, be consistent.

Nothing will do greater harm to your hard work than inconsistency across slides. Here are a few things to look out for:

• Make sure your main headings are in exactly the same place on every slide.
• Ensure the margins are the same, so that body copy is always a set distance from the edges, or from the headings themselves.
• Circles should be circles, not ovals.
• Colours should be consistent; for example, always have headings in one colour throughout.
• If you use a 1pt grey line for a table with a bold font, then use the same rule for your graphs.

This can be the most time-consuming phase of designing a deck, as it involves checking and double checking. The efforts are worth it as the end result is a Powerpoint that feels uniform and robust. You can’t underestimate what your Powerpoint says about you as a firm, especially as a first impression.

Powerpoint is often seen a means to an end, but with patience, perseverance and experience, you can turn something which seems pedestrian into something sophisticated and engaging.

Content is king, but proper time must be dedicated to making that content shine. The common idiom about not judging a book by it’s cover may have some truth, but the reality is that we all judge based on appearance. With an increasingly sophisticated audience to impress, the need to differentiate your brand is more pivotal than ever before.

First impressions count, and we believe that taking the time to craft a stylish and distinguished deck will make a difference.

Further Reading

Here are a couple of other sites with some good suggestions on how to improve your PowerPoint designs.

• 14 PowerPoint Presentation Tips to Make Your PPT Designs More Effective
• 11 Design Tips for Beautiful Presentations

6 Essential Tips For Financial Website Design

5 fintech design trends to watch in 2020, similar content, peregrine london.

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20 Presentation Tips to Keep Your Audience Engaged from Start to Finish

Business | Marketing | Nonprofits | Students | Teachers

By kai tomboc - january 14, 2020.

Losing the audience’s attention is one of the most painful challenges for anyone making a presentation.

Halfway through your presentation, you notice that a couple of audience members are getting restless. The people at the back seem bored as they look down on their phones, and one of them just yawned (ugh!).

You start to feel that you failed to engage your audience. You wonder if you’re the problem. Are you a boring presenter? Perhaps you’re stuffing too much information in your slides.

Master audience engagement with these presentation best practices

From engaging product demos to presentation decks that stand out, read on for 20 valuable tips to keep your audience excited to hear more from you.

What makes a great presentation?

Before you get started, it pays to know what makes an excellent presentation.

1. It informs your audience by providing reliable information.

People want to be informed. They want to learn something new. For this reason, you should look for reputable links. The information should be as recent as possible, and at least less than a year old.

Your research work doesn’t need to be from online sources. You could also cite printed sources from the library. Double-check all of your sources and make sure they have substantial research and statistics to back them up.

2. It persuades your audience to take action.

A presentation should be persuasive. This is especially true for business presentations and product demos. You might also want to appeal to your readers through emotions.

3. It educates your audience and empowers them to make informed decisions.

Presentations are, by nature, educational. You might be introducing your audience to a new idea, product, or service.

4. It instructs your audience in a clear, compelling way.

A presentation should be instructional. Organize your presentation as clear and concise as possible, so your audience will be able to digest your information more effectively.

5. It inspires your audience by being memorable.

A good presentation motivates an audience to act on things that they’ve been meaning to do after hearing you speak or present.

20 best pactices for visually-appealing, convincing presentations

With all that in mind, here’s a list of useful best practices and tips for presentations that stick.

1. Know your target audience.

Your target audience is the demographic that you’re aiming to convince, educate, or inspire with your presentation. This crucial step helps you craft a presentation that resonates with your intended audience.

For instance, if you’d like to educate teens, create a presentation that appeals to their age group. Make your presentation more upbeat, and use pop culture references and images that they can relate to.

On the other hand, if your target audience spans middle-aged professionals, your presentation should be straight-to-the-point and based on facts. These professionals are typically results-oriented, and they want to get to the heart of the matter right away.

By and large, getting to know your target audience enables you to create a presentation without wasting time on uninterested demographics.

2. Create an outline.

Your next step is to create an outline of your presentation. It will help ensure order in your presentation and present facts and sources as effectively and efficiently possible.

It’ll also help if you assign a subtopic for each slide. Let’s say your main topic is the American Civil War. The war lasted roughly four years, and if you delve into it without any organizational structure, your audience will end up confused. Sort your slides according to year and the important events that took place. The same applies to any topic.

3. Start with a memorable introduction.

Opening a presentation with “My name is .. ” or “I’m here to talk about..” are less likely to make your presentation memorable and engaging to your audience.

So how do you keep everyone glued to your presentation with a powerful, memorable opener?

Share an anecdote, ask an intriguing question, or get people’s energy up with a short activity.

Next, make your opening slides as eye-catching as possible. In your opening slide, use bold fonts. Add visuals like gifs or an animated infographic.

Finally, provide an overview of your presentation in the introduction slide. An overview that meets your audience’s expectations of your presentation helps keep an audience absorbed and attentive from start to finish.

4. Eliminate clutter in your slides.

Avoid overcrowding your slides with images or graphics. Although it’s fine to use visuals to complement your slides, the keyword here is “complement.”

Too many photos will make your slides look cramped. Take a minimalist approach to your slides. For images and graphics, use them sparingly and thoughtfully.

Don’t be afraid of white space in your slides. Consider readability first, visual appeal second.

5. Use pictograms.

Lengthy presentations could get boring in the long run. So if you want to keep your audience’s attention, you will need to make your presentation attractive and easier to understand.

Enter pictograms !

Pictograms express information, ideas, or messages through images, signs, or symbols. Also, they can help simplify complicated concepts.

6. Be thoughtful of your color scheme.  

Your choice of colors can have an impact on your audience’s mood and perception of your presentation. It may not be evident at first glance, but your presentation colors can draw a particular set of feelings from your audience. Orange looks more carefree than beige, right?

Here are some quick tips to help you pick the right color combination for your presentation:

• Choose a color scheme that matches your presentation’s theme. For example, if you’re about to present a serious topic, consider somber, dignified colors like white, black, or brown. But if you want your presentation to be more upbeat, use lighter hues like yellow and orange. 
•  Use your brand colors to raise brand awareness and recognition. 
• Stick to 2-3 colors. Joint research by Adobe and the University of Toronto revealed that most people prefer a combination of 2-3 colors. A good rule of thumb is not to use more than four colors. When using more than 3-4 colors, go for shades, tones, and tints of your original colors like the example below.

7. Focus your audience’s attention using data visualization.

Presenting statistics and percentages in writing can be a challenge to use in your presentation. For this reason, consider data visualization.

For example, graphs and charts are often used to highlight comparisons in data. You can also use them to inform your audience of a specific data point.

It’s worth noting that a poorly-designed graph or chart could ruin your presentation if proven false or shabbily done. Make sure that your data are correct, and your diagrams or charts are correctly labeled. Don’t just use pie charts because they look hip and smart. You have to learn how to choose the right chart or graph to visualize your data.

8. Use presentation templates.

Templates often take a bad rap because they’re perceived as limiting, sapping one of creative freedom. However, templates shouldn’t be perceived this way.

Think of templates as frameworks or a set of building blocks that you can tinker with as you create your presentation. Without a templated structure, you’ll likely waste a lot of time and resources making your presentation from scratch.

For example, use infographic templates as a way to make your presentation more engaging (minus the time-consuming task of making a presentation from scratch. The process infographic template below is perfect if you’re explaining a process in one of your presentations.

9. Try the duotone effect in your presentations.

The duotone effect is the use of two contrasting colors to create dramatic, visually pleasing results. Thus the name duotone.

This design style is gaining popularity with designers and non-designers alike. Learn more from this quick duotone tutorial via Adobe .

10. Show, don’t tell.

Stories are a powerful medium to get your audience to sit up and listen to you. For this reason, aim to “show” rather than “tell” your audience about a topic, insight, or idea.

For example, don’t just state facts or figures about the dangers of not investing in their retirement. Instead, share the story of someone you know who failed to plan for their retirement, nudging your audience towards making their own conclusions or insights.

Don’t bombard your audience with too much information all at once. Avoid jargon or complex concepts without sharing a story that’ll resonate with them. With compelling storytelling, you can create anticipation and then slowly build up to your key points.

11. Incorporate infographics into your presentation.

Infographics are valuable presentation tools because they combine visuals and text. As a result, you can communicate with impact.

Furthermore, infographics make your presentation more memorable. How?

A relevant image paired with informative text helps people retain 65 percent of the information three days later — a stark contrast to presenting text-only content where someone’s likely to remember only 10 percent of the information.

Here are a few guides and tutorials when creating infographics for your next presentation:

• Guide to Making Infographics from Scratch (guide)
• 5 Ways to Use Call to Action in Your Infographic to Boost Audience Engagement (video)
• How to Write Sharp, Compelling Infographic Copy (guide)

Easelly Pro Tip: Divide long infographics into smaller segments. Add an infographic section for each presentation slide. If you’d like to raise the bar further for your presentation, try animated infographics to make your slides come to life.

12. Avoid using bullet points.

Bullet points are great tools to emphasize tips, features, or steps in lists. However, it’s best to avoid them in presentations because they don’t help your audience retain information.

Research even supports this recommendation. In 2014, the International Journal of Business Communication published the results of their research —   The Use of Visualization in the Communication of Business Strategies: An Experimental Evaluation .

The researchers wanted to learn whether the use of visuals is superior to text (a bulleted list to be specific) in communicating the strategy of the financial services branch of an international car manufacturer.

The researchers concluded the following:

“Subjects who were exposed to a graphic representation of the strategy paid significantly more attention to, agreed more with, and better recalled the strategy than did subjects who saw a (textually identical) bulleted list version.”

Instead of using bullet points, consider using icons or visuals.

Take a look at the example below. Which do you think will likely get the audience’s attention and be more memorable after the presentation?

13. Choose fonts that are easier to read.

The quality of your font could affect your audience’s reaction to your presentation. Don’t just use the first standard font that pops up in your presentation editor.

Your font should match the mood and intent of your presentation. If you want your presentation to appear casual, choose a font that gives off a similar feeling.

14. Use contrast in your presentation.

Check for contrast between your texts and presentation background to ensure readability. Make it a point to distinguish one from the other.

It’s also worth noting that you are going to show your presentation to a group of people. Depending on the seating arrangement, viewers at the back may find it hard to read your presentation. Make sure that your fonts are of the appropriate size. That way, none of your audience members will have to struggle reading your slides.

15. Consider gifs and memes

Gifs and memes are popular media tools for a good reason. You could incorporate them into your presentation, and they could add a sense of humor to your topic or pitch.

When using gifs and memes, avoid those that could be misinterpreted as politically incorrect or culturally insensitive.

16. Create a consistent look and feel in your slides.

Choose a theme for your presentation templates, and stick with it ’til the end.

This doesn’t mean that you should be boring or dull with your presentation. You can add images and infographics, but there should be a sense of consistency in your slides.

Consistency leads to familiarity, which in turn encourages learning and engagement.

17. Ask intriguing questions.

Asking intriguing questions enables you to draw your audience’s attention and highlight key points at the same time.

For example, you are conducting a presentation on the Roman empire. You want to get your audience’s attention, so you raise questions such as what they know about the Roman empire, and how did the Roman empire impact modern society?

The audience may or may not get the right answers, but they will most likely try their best to answer your questions. The resulting exchange of ideas will make your presentation more spontaneous and engaging.

18. Limit to one visual per slide.

Using too many visuals at once will make your presentation appear cluttered. Limit to one visual per slide to help your audience engage more with your text and information.

19. Embrace white space.

White space , also known as negative space, is the space between the lines of texts and visuals in your presentation.  It doesn’t have to be  white  as it can also take the color of your presentation’s background. Think of white space as “empty space”. 

It helps improves readability and ensures that your graphics and texts are clear and legible in your presentation. 

20. End your presentation with an excellent call-to-action.

Call-to-action statements are an integral part of any presentation. They compel your audience to take action, and it makes your presentation more interactive.

Here’s a short video explaining how to use call-to-action in infographics (the same principles apply for presentations!):

Say you’re designing a presentation for a new gym you’re managing. You want people to try out the gym and the services you offer. You could incorporate the call to action at the end of your presentation.

“See you at the gym next week?” or “Level up in the New Year by signing up for our free gym membership for a month!” are good call-to-action statements that you can use.

Ready to start creating your presentation?

We’ve got your back if you need help with your visuals and infographics for your next presentation.

Use our simple infographic maker tool or hire one of our infographic design pros for custom infographics and animated infographics .

Here’s to a stellar presentation – we’re rooting for you!

More to learn from the blog…

Video: the history of infographics and its evolution.

Infographics have come a long way. But where did infographics come from and how did they get to be so popular? Infographics, by defi...

VIDEO: Easel.ly’s NEW Infographic Design Service

We know you’re busy. Whether it’s with your business, customers, students, family, or your personal life, we all have a lot on our plat...

G2 Recognized Easelly as a Leader in Design Software for Small Businesses in 2018

Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and we’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you to Easelly users and customers around the...

Can I print my slides without white page margins?

In PowerPoint for the web, slide backgrounds extend to the edges of the slide. But when you print, a white margin appears around the edges of the slide. This is because most printers can’t do borderless printing.

Some printers have a "margin" option you can adjust that may make white margins smaller, but it still may not eliminate them entirely.

Select File > Print > Print Full Page Slides .

In the Print dialog box, look for a More settings link and select it.

Look for "Advanced" options or a "Margins" option that you can adjust, such as in the example below:

More about printers and margins

Most inkjet printers create irregular, nonprintable margins, with the margin that prints last) generally being wider than the margins on the other three sides.

When PowerPoint for the web prints a slide, it sends an image of the slide to the printer at whatever size the printer and printer driver specify as the largest printable size. But PowerPoint for the web can’t control where on the page the printer places the slide image.

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Less is more: Why wordy slides are an audience turn-off

Bad news, the average PowerPoint slide now contains 40 words. For perspective, the amount of information we retain at a time is a maximum of just four items! If you want your message to stick, overcrowding your slides with text is simply not an option.

The good news is, it’s never too late to salvage your slides. Here’s how to avoid this common presentation blunder.

Allow your audience to listen Every presentation aims to get a message across. With too much text on your slides, it’s likely that your audience will become preoccupied with reading. This divides their attention and prevents them from fully engaging with you.

It’s far better for your audience to listen than read. Compared to listening, reading involves one extra step – called decoding – before information is understood. By listening, your audience instantly gets the message, leaving you free to influence and inspire them.

Choose impact over volume Distill your information into a few key points. Expert speakers will often select just three points and stick to those. You may have more than three points to present, but remember, our minds can only handle up to four items at a time.

If you’re struggling to keep the word count down, why not use a picture? Choose a high-quality image that illustrates your point, supports your message and makes it memorable for your audience.

Don’t forget about handouts These are great for communicating text-heavy information or items that are difficult to read on screen. By providing your audience with handouts, they’ll know that they don’t need to take notes, which means they can simply sit back and enjoy your presentation.

Remember, you’re the expert Wordy slides make it easy for presenters to just read the text aloud. Audiences don’t appreciate this. A survey found that nearly 70% of audiences said the most annoying thing a speaker does during presentations is reading from their slides.

If you’re presenting on a topic, chances are you’re the expert at it. Be confident in your knowledge. Don’t turn your slides into a teleprompter or include everything you plan to say. Think about it, would you trust a doctor who answers questions by reading out of a textbook? You’re more credible if you can simply talk about your topic.

Practice your delivery Practice your presentation well and you won’t need too many notes. Even the most successful speakers make time to rehearse. Because no one is born naturally confident, you’ll need to work hard to polish your skills. Presentations look effortless after you put in the effort to rehearse.

If you need to follow notes, add these into the notes section where only you can see it. Remember, slides should support your talk and aid comprehension – not act as your proxy.

In a nutshell Avoid text-heavy slides by going for impact over volume and ensure your audience gets the message every time!

Are wordy slides disengaging your audiences? Let Slidemaster help you to achieve maximum impact with minimum text. We’ll work with you to understand your objectives, audience and key messages to deliver a concise, persuasive and visually-stunning presentation.

Call to action: Contact us today or simply click here to access your free PowerPoint template.

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8 Tips You Can Use to Make Your Presentation Longer

Last updated on May 31st, 2023

Striking that perfect duration for your presentation can be tricky. Your presentation should be brief so as not to bore your audience and to take advantage of the attention span , but it should also be thorough so you can fully deliver your message. There will be times when you’ll need to have a longer presentation than what you had planned, and it can be daunting to prolong the session on the spot if you don’t know what to do. Remember, a long presentation doesn’t mean a wordy presentation.

Let’s say you were forced to use a specific time frame for your presentation. As an example, let’s assume this is a 60-minute presentation. But when you realize you’ve prepared a presentation that you can deliver in 30 minutes, what would you do to cover the timing requirements and time constraints? While we already covered how many slides for a 30 minute presentation , in this article, we’ll share eight tips you can apply to make a presentation longer, some you can do before in preparation, and others you can use during the presentation. But first, let’s talk about why you might need a longer presentation.

What are some reasons you might need a longer presentation?

You don’t want to look unprepared. When not done properly, a presentation that is too short may give off the impression that you do not know a lot about the topic you are presenting, or that you did not exert enough effort in creating the presentation. This, even if you have delivered a message effectively and already said everything you needed to say. By having a long and effective presentation, you can show that you are capable and knowledgeable about the topic. It is not the idea to talk for the sake of talking, because if that is the case a wise decision would be to be honest with your audience and cut the presentation beforehand. But in some other situations, this is not the case, and you need to use all the time that you have available for the presentation.

Recommended reading: 75+ actionable topic ideas for your presentations in PowerPoint or Google Slides

You want your audience to feel engaged. Studies from military training have shown that there is a certain balance you should strike when delivering a message to make sure your audience connects with you and understands your key points. Too short a presentation usually does not give the audience enough time or information to fully embrace the topic.

Your presentation time was changed at the last minute . When you’re presenting as part of a panel, you always have to be prepared to adjust the duration of your speech in case you have to accommodate a change in schedule. If you have been asked to fill in for another presenter, you’ll have to find a way to stretch the presentation to make it longer .

What is the ideal length for a presentation? It will depend. Is the presentation you are creating a speech (not a workshop)? In those cases, ideal length may vary between 10 and 20 minutes. However, in some situations you may want to make your presentations longer in time.

How to make a presentation longer (8 Actionable Tips)

Before the presentation.

It is best to design your presentation to already be substantive beforehand so that you can take up as much time as needed to present your topic. Here are 4 tips and strategies to use when making your presentation:

Over-prepare

If you have been asked to present for 20 minutes, make sure to prepare enough content for at least 25 minutes. A common standard is that you should always be ready to speak 25% more than you were asked to do. It is much easier to be over-prepared and just cut the less important points from the presentation than to add points that you weren’t prepared for.

Layout a timed schedule for your presentation.

Plan out your speech by knowing how long you take for specific portions of the presentation. This includes your introduction, all the key points, your closing remarks, and any engagements you have prepared like a Q&A portion from the audience. This allows you to have a more detailed estimation of the duration of your presentation, and you can see which parts of your speech you can choose to stretch or insert additional information. This action requires a proper planning, and define the presentation structure beforehand. Alternatively, you can work in a presentation outline first.

Design your PowerPoint presentation purposefully.

Having a visual aid like a PowerPoint presentation is a must in any professional setting, and you can harness it to lengthen your presentation and make it more substantive. By including a graph or a data set to your slides, you are giving yourself a short break from constant speaking.

To help you in designing effective presentations, check out our roster of the best free PowerPoint templates , as chosen by the editor.

Present facts and quotes

A million dollar tip to make your presentation longer is to include new facts and why not, quote slides. Adding facts to your presentations not only will help to transmit the Logos part of the Rhetoric triangle (Logos is an appeal to logic, and is a way of persuading an audience by reason), but also help to lengthen your presentation a few seconds.

Similarly, presenting quotes from famous characters (they can be from different areas, such as politics, sports, public speaking, etc.), you can motivate your audience and keep then engaged. The audience will dedicate a few seconds to reasoning about the quote, what it means, what it tries to say and also about the personality or character who said it, remembering different stories. This will of course help to stretch your presentation a few seconds more. Using a free quote slide for PowerPoint can help you to achieve this with no hassle.

Vary the elements of your presentation.

When appropriate, you can add more types of media into your presentation. A short video clip or an impactful image is a great thing to incorporate. Not only do they lengthen your presentation, but they also spice up your speech and make it more engaging.

If your presentation is too short, you can apply the 10/20/30 rule for presentations, in which there should be no more than 10 slides, the presentation should last no more than 20 minutes, and there should be no text smaller than 30 points. This way, you can extend your presentation to a 20-minute length.

During the presentation

Making a presentation longer while you’re already at the podium is all about adapting and taking control of the time. Here are 4 tips that you can employ to make your presentation longer, during the presentation:

1. Speak slowly yet deliberately

Your nerves when public speaking can cause you to speak in a rush or in a panic. Take control of your voice and speak more slowly and include short pauses when making a point. By speaking slowly yet deliberately, you effectively lengthen your speech, and you also help your audience grasp your message much easier.

2. Stress out and repeat key concepts

When presenting, do not shy away from repeating the main points of your message throughout the presentation. By repeating key concepts, you hammer them down so that your audience remembers them and takes them away after the presentation. Stressing out main points is also one of the tips in making a brain-friendly presentation.

3. Add in your reserved examples, stories, and anecdotes

If you’ve done your over-preparation, this is the time when you can include the extra information you have exceedingly prepared and incorporate them into the speech. However, make sure that what you add is still related to the topic and adds substance to the speech. Remember, a long presentation does not mean a wordy presentation.

4. Enrich your presentations with videos

Adding videos to your presentations or embedding a video into your slides and playing it during the slide show can help you to make your presentation longer. However, this technique must be combined with other ones. If you embed a video in your PowerPoint presentations, make sure that it resonates with the topic and speech, and try to keep the attention span in mind. Videos longer than 3 minutes may make your presentation too boring unless the video is engaging enough. Please be sure to use this technique with caution. Additionally, consider that when using videos, the estimated number of slides may vary because each video is generally presented in a slide. So, for instance, if you rely on a specific number of slides for a 10-minute presentation , understand that using videos would require fewer number of slides.

Engage with your audience

Audience participation is a great strategy to use when you’re playing for time and need a longer presentation. There are many ways you can engage your audience throughout the presentation. You can say that you are open to questions during the speech rather than afterward in the Q&A session (Questions and Answers). You can also ask a question, and ask for simple input from the audience like a show of hands.

Final Thoughts

When you need to explain your topic thoroughly and intensively, long presentations are the way to go. However, keep in mind that longer presentations have to be engaging so as not to lose the interest of your audience You can use the 8 tips and techniques that we have mentioned above to help you deliver longer presentations that remain effective and dynamic, so you can nail your presentations every time.

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• How to Make Your Slides Not Look Like PowerPoint

Data Viz – How Close Are We to a Budget Deal?

The greatest storyteller of all time.

I’ve heard a lot of advice on how to make your slides look more professional. But one of the best pieces of advice is this: try to make your PowerPoint slides not look like PowerPoint slides.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to choose a different font. By default, PowerPoint will offer you Calibri. And by default, your slides will look like every other PowerPoint slide. Yaawn.

But you can make a better impression on clients, colleagues and students if you’ll choose a different font. I like to use Rockwell for the titles and Segoe UI for the body. You can change the font in the slide master.

Oh, by the way. You may be wondering about that lovely slide background. What is that? It’s simply this photograph on Flickr , shared via a Creative Commons License from the photographer Brinzei. I had to adjust the transparency to mute the image a bit, then crop out the trees at the bottom. Changing your background to a textured background is another great tip for making your slides not look like PowerPoint. I’ve created this video showing you how to make textured backgrounds.

About the author: Bruce Gabrielle is author of Speaking PowerPoint: the New Language of Business , showing a 12-step method for creating clearer and more persuasive PowerPoint slides for boardroom presentations. Subscribe to this blog or join my LinkedIn group to get new posts sent to your inbox.

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Related posts, 6 steps to a snazzier title slide, do your powerpoint slides have a clear visual path, make slides that pop using color contrast – powerpoint video tip #18.

Why a cropped photo for the background if you could easily get that same visual effect using powerpoint resident tools?

Hi Miguel – What resident tools will give you a textured background like this?

— Bruce

To “replicate” this special case, you can insert a shape, fill it with a gradient, copy and paste it as a picture (paste options/as picture), under “format picture/artistic effects” apply the texture of your choice, adjust with any “Picture Corrections” or “Picture Color”…

You can redo all the copy & paste process and apply textures over textures…

Oops… forgot to add this example made before your suggestion: http://tinyurl.com/q697wkw

Very cool. So 1. Create a radial gradient 2. Copy and paste it as a PNG file 3. Use Format > Artistic Effects to add a texture 4. Repeat the copy/paste-as-PNG and artistic effects adding textures on top of textures

That’s another useful way to create a textured background.

— Bruce Gabrielle

Doesn’t even need to be a gradient or specify PNG.

It can be done with anything you create from PP’s “Insert” menu, text included.

Simply copy & paste “your” previously edited or customized shape.

The icon which appears in the right-bottom corner of the placed shape “Paste Options (Ctrl)” will offer two options: “Use Destination Theme (H)” which will keep it as is (well not simply that) or “Picture (U)” which will paste an image.

Then you’re free to process it with any PP resident “Picture Tools”…

I have found lately that I just tell a story using pictures. No words. Participants seem to remember the highlight points a lot easier. Also generates talking points and much more discussion. Many sites for free iphotostock as well as using my iPhone to take specific/relevant pictures for the topic that nay be field related.

That may work for some presentations. But not others.

Hi Bruce, Thanks for the article. Quick question – are Rockwell and Segoe UI available as commonly on all computers (- like Times or Arial)? If not, using the same might end up not showing properly on clients’ system. Thanks and regards, Amit Kapoor

Segoe UI will work on any computer with Office 2007, 2010, Vista or 7. I don’t believe it works on Mac.

Not sure about Rockwell. You can save your presentation with the fonts embedded so even if they don’t have that font installed, it will still show up as if they did. The instructions for doing this are different for different versions of PowerPoint .