Is Your Visual Presentation BORING?

Does your presentation lose your audience or capture them? A boring slide show will definitely lose people! Here are 6 tips to creating an attractive presentation:

1. A Consistent Visual Style: Create your own theme to maintain your brand guidelines and represent your company! All the fonts, colors, layout, and animations should be consistent in their feel and look. If you use a different style for every slide, you’ll end up with a messy, unprofessional-looking presentation.

2. Use High-Quality Graphics: Graphics add a lot to the design of a presentation, but using a poor-quality, low-resolution image will look unprofessional. Once you’ve added your images to the presentation, make sure they’re aligned and look like they’re visually related.

3. Avoid Clutter: Less is more - keep each point or summary short. If there’s too much content, split it up onto more than one slide. Too many pictures, words, tables, colors, or animations will only end up overwhelming or confusing your audience. Keep the information to a minimum if possible, so you can organize and design it for maximum impact. An ideal slide will contain a headline, 3-6 bullet points, and a picture or graph. You can always add extra talking points in the Notes section that you can speak to during the presentation. This will enable you to keep the information on the slide high level and clutter-free.

4. Don’t Use Fancy Fonts: While different fonts can enhance the presentation and add visual interest, sticking with easy-to-read fonts is always the best choice. For more informal topics, feel free to use fonts that match the topic as long as they’re still legible. Font size is also very important. As a general rule, use a font size of at least 24 points for headings and 14 points for the body copy.

5. Use Color Carefully: Colors are one of the main components when designing a presentation. When used in a smart way, they can add a lot to the style. Colors are usually used in accordance with the logo or brand colors of the company. A logo can have one or more colors, so decide which one is the most prominent or best for presentations, and use that color for most things. If there is no brand color, use colors that highly contrast each other. Don’t make your slide a rainbow of colors. Stick to 2-3 colors per slide and keep the same color, or at least the same color style, for the whole presentation.

6. Use Animation: Animation can take a presentation from boring to inspiring. Avoid cluttering the presentation with too many animated elements or overly complex animations. Don’t use any animation that diverts the audience’s focus from the content or from the presenter. The purpose of animation is to help better define and enhance the content, not to overwhelm or distract. If there’s too much content on a slide and you don’t want to split it into multiple slides, animation is the best solution. For example, if you have a list of five steps, you can use animation to reveal one step at a time.

Does your presentation share a powerful story? Do all the little details work together? Is it communicating what you want it to communicate? Will it resonate with your audience?