Designing a PowerPoint Presentation to Suit Your Needs
Attention is the world’s strongest currency. Companies and brands spend billions vying for our attention — which has become ever so fleeting.
When you design a PowerPoint presentation, you want to get and keep that attention. Your aim should be to leverage the world's most lucrative currency to meet your objective. A well-designed PowerPoint has the power to captivate an audience by simplifying complex subjects and creating visual aids for composite data. It can persuade and engage, validating your topic.
However, a poorly designed PowerPoint achieves the opposite. It causes your audience to lose focus — ultimately losing interest in the subject. To influence your audience, you want to achieve the former. Here's how.
Concise Guide on PowerPoint Design: Presentations that Influence
To help you understand how to design your presentations to satisfy your objectives, we've divided PowerPoint design into four categories: fonts, text, visuals, and special effects.
Fonts
Your slide won't have much of an impact if the audience has to squint to read the text. Therefore, while there's room for creativity within most presentations, avoid expressing that creativity through fonts. Use a Sans Serif font, typically in bold. It's the easiest to read.
Font size also matters. The smallest size on the slide should be 32pts, ensuring everyone can read it.
Text
Brevity is something you need to master if you want to create compelling PowerPoint presentations. But being concise is challenging, even for seasoned writers. Writing succinctly means each word must be impactful.
Remember, superfluous terms and phrases can be distracting. More words than necessary can cause the audience to focus on reading — not something you're aiming for when your speech should be doing most of the heavy lifting.
We recommend following the 6x6 rule.
Your slide should include at most six lines of text and six words per line.
When designing your PowerPoint presentation, think the following about the text. Text should:
Summarize the major points in the conversation, giving clarity to your speech
Not distract from your commentary
Add value to your presentation
Visuals
Visuals — like infographics, icons, tables, charts, and images — can be contentious. Some may feel each slide needs at least one visual to engage the audience. Others may have a different opinion.
We've found less is more when including visuals in a PowerPoint design presentation. Consider what your visuals are adding to the topic or subject. Query whether they:
Simplify a topic
Give clarity to complex statements
Provide a visual guide for data
Build a compelling argument
Offer greater detail
If the visual doesn't do at least one of the above in a slide, it's distracting.
You can apply this rule regardless of the presentation's objective because it relies on the premise that you want to retain your audience's attention.
Special Effects
Whether you think they're impressive or aren't too perturbed about special effects, you'll want to skip them altogether.
But what about in a less formal setting?
Special effects don't work in any professional setting, whether you're presenting to colleagues, clients, investors, or peers. They don't add value. Instead, use tables, charts, images, or infographics, to achieve your desired effect.
If tempted, remember: special effects will only distract from what you're presenting.
Do you want your audience to be more impressed with your use of effects or the subject matter?
Choose colour, highlights, bold, and underline rather than effects.
Within the aforementioned parameters, you can display your creativity and design a cohesive slide rooted in your company's branding.
Consider Using Professionals for Effective PowerPoint Design
Although the above guide will make you proficient at designing a PowerPoint for most occasions, when a presentation impacts your business or its image, you want to lean on a pro for PowerPoint design presentation.
Using PowerPoint presentation companies will ensure your slides convince a non-captive audience — like investors or potential clients.
Through their PowerPoint design services, these companies ensure you convey your central points with a riveting slide that builds on your charisma. Part of that service is to create a mesmerizing presentation that supports your point.
Taking your purpose into consideration, the team at Navig8 can reverse engineer the most captivating presentation; a presentation that is memorable for all the right reasons and has the desired outcome.