Whatever the subject of your presentation is, the goal is to get your message across to your audience. Designing an information-filled presentation is easy. Making it informative, easy to understand, and interesting to look at is hard. These 5 tips can help you create a perfect presentation that will engage your audience.
Choose Your Pictures Well
Images are crucial for visual part of your presentation. Dark and bad quality pictures won’t get your point across even if they suit the subject perfectly. Take the time to find high-quality images to insert in your presentation.
Make sure the nature of the images you use suits your topic and industry. Humorous and cheesy pics might be suitable for a new toy presentation but won’t cut it for the new technologies in the plastic surgery industry.
If you are just starting out and do not want to spend too much money on images for your presentation, try out royalty free images.
Find the Right Fonts
How can fonts be important? Newbies in the presentation-making world might not understand the power of typography. Custom presentation design experts say that well-chosen fonts can sometimes be more crucial than images.
It’s also important not to overdo the fonts. If you consider the fonts simple and boring and go over to something artsy like MS Word’s Algerian, you might lose your audience. Make sure the fonts are easy to read. Your audience should at all times be focused on your message instead of trying to figure out what’s written on your screen.
Be Careful About Readability
When you are done with each part of the presentation, leave it alone for 5 minutes and take a fresh look at it. Does it read well? Can you grasp the subject? Do you have the right image text ratio?
The best way to check the readability is to ask someone else to look at your presentation while you are still at the designing stage.
Try to Be Simple
Unless you are a professional designer, trying out new tricks on your presentation might be a bad idea. The quality of the presentation depends on the speaker. No matter how colorful you make the presentation, a bad speaker can easily ruin it and vice versa.
If you are not a pro, try to keep the slides as simple as possible. Don’t go all out with colors and special effects. Using them unprofessionally can lead to unfortunate results. Try to keep the text to a minimum, highlight important parts, and leave the rest to the speaker.
Keep The Lists Short
Lists and bullet points are designed to improve the readability of the text. Scanning through the text is much easier when there are bullet points, right? Not always. Many newbie presentation designers fall for the bullet point trap and use too many points.
Try to keep the points to a minimum so the reader doesn’t get tired of the scanning process. Ideally, a list should be short enough to be grasped after one glance.
Choose The Right Tool
Currently there are two presentation tools available on the market: Prezi and PowerPoint. If you are just starting out, go for the one that you are more familiar with. Both Prezi and PowerPoint have its own advantages so if you have to learn either of them from scratch, research which one would suit your industry niche more. Here is a useful article that will help you choose between Prezi and PowerPoint.