principles of good presentation

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What It Takes to Give a Great Presentation

• Carmine Gallo

Five tips to set yourself apart.

Never underestimate the power of great communication. It can help you land the job of your dreams, attract investors to back your idea, or elevate your stature within your organization. But while there are plenty of good speakers in the world, you can set yourself apart out by being the person who can deliver something great over and over. Here are a few tips for business professionals who want to move from being good speakers to great ones: be concise (the fewer words, the better); never use bullet points (photos and images paired together are more memorable); don’t underestimate the power of your voice (raise and lower it for emphasis); give your audience something extra (unexpected moments will grab their attention); rehearse (the best speakers are the best because they practice — a lot).

I was sitting across the table from a Silicon Valley CEO who had pioneered a technology that touches many of our lives — the flash memory that stores data on smartphones, digital cameras, and computers. He was a frequent guest on CNBC and had been delivering business presentations for at least 20 years before we met. And yet, the CEO wanted to sharpen his public speaking skills.

• Carmine Gallo is a Harvard University instructor, keynote speaker, and author of 10 books translated into 40 languages. Gallo is the author of The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman  (St. Martin’s Press).

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How To Make a Good Presentation [A Complete Guide]

By Krystle Wong , Jul 20, 2023

A top-notch presentation possesses the power to drive action. From winning stakeholders over and conveying a powerful message to securing funding — your secret weapon lies within the realm of creating an effective presentation .  

Being an excellent presenter isn’t confined to the boardroom. Whether you’re delivering a presentation at work, pursuing an academic career, involved in a non-profit organization or even a student, nailing the presentation game is a game-changer.

In this article, I’ll cover the top qualities of compelling presentations and walk you through a step-by-step guide on how to give a good presentation. Here’s a little tip to kick things off: for a headstart, check out Venngage’s collection of free presentation templates . They are fully customizable, and the best part is you don’t need professional design skills to make them shine!

These valuable presentation tips cater to individuals from diverse professional backgrounds, encompassing business professionals, sales and marketing teams, educators, trainers, students, researchers, non-profit organizations, public speakers and presenters. 

No matter your field or role, these tips for presenting will equip you with the skills to deliver effective presentations that leave a lasting impression on any audience.

Click to jump ahead:

What are the 10 qualities of a good presentation?

Step-by-step guide on how to prepare an effective presentation, 9 effective techniques to deliver a memorable presentation, faqs on making a good presentation, how to create a presentation with venngage in 5 steps.

When it comes to giving an engaging presentation that leaves a lasting impression, it’s not just about the content — it’s also about how you deliver it. Wondering what makes a good presentation? Well, the best presentations I’ve seen consistently exhibit these 10 qualities:

1. Clear structure

No one likes to get lost in a maze of information. Organize your thoughts into a logical flow, complete with an introduction, main points and a solid conclusion. A structured presentation helps your audience follow along effortlessly, leaving them with a sense of satisfaction at the end.

Regardless of your presentation style , a quality presentation starts with a clear roadmap. Browse through Venngage’s template library and select a presentation template that aligns with your content and presentation goals. Here’s a good presentation example template with a logical layout that includes sections for the introduction, main points, supporting information and a conclusion: 

2. Engaging opening

Hook your audience right from the start with an attention-grabbing statement, a fascinating question or maybe even a captivating anecdote. Set the stage for a killer presentation!

The opening moments of your presentation hold immense power – check out these 15 ways to start a presentation to set the stage and captivate your audience.

3. Relevant content

Make sure your content aligns with their interests and needs. Your audience is there for a reason, and that’s to get valuable insights. Avoid fluff and get straight to the point, your audience will be genuinely excited.

4. Effective visual aids

Picture this: a slide with walls of text and tiny charts, yawn! Visual aids should be just that—aiding your presentation. Opt for clear and visually appealing slides, engaging images and informative charts that add value and help reinforce your message.

With Venngage, visualizing data takes no effort at all. You can import data from CSV or Google Sheets seamlessly and create stunning charts, graphs and icon stories effortlessly to showcase your data in a captivating and impactful way.

5. Clear and concise communication

Keep your language simple, and avoid jargon or complicated terms. Communicate your ideas clearly, so your audience can easily grasp and retain the information being conveyed. This can prevent confusion and enhance the overall effectiveness of the message. 

6. Engaging delivery

Spice up your presentation with a sprinkle of enthusiasm! Maintain eye contact, use expressive gestures and vary your tone of voice to keep your audience glued to the edge of their seats. A touch of charisma goes a long way!

7. Interaction and audience engagement

Turn your presentation into an interactive experience — encourage questions, foster discussions and maybe even throw in a fun activity. Engaged audiences are more likely to remember and embrace your message.

Transform your slides into an interactive presentation with Venngage’s dynamic features like pop-ups, clickable icons and animated elements. Engage your audience with interactive content that lets them explore and interact with your presentation for a truly immersive experience.

8. Effective storytelling

Who doesn’t love a good story? Weaving relevant anecdotes, case studies or even a personal story into your presentation can captivate your audience and create a lasting impact. Stories build connections and make your message memorable.

A great presentation background is also essential as it sets the tone, creates visual interest and reinforces your message. Enhance the overall aesthetics of your presentation with these 15 presentation background examples and captivate your audience’s attention.

9. Well-timed pacing

Pace your presentation thoughtfully with well-designed presentation slides, neither rushing through nor dragging it out. Respect your audience’s time and ensure you cover all the essential points without losing their interest.

10. Strong conclusion

Last impressions linger! Summarize your main points and leave your audience with a clear takeaway. End your presentation with a bang , a call to action or an inspiring thought that resonates long after the conclusion.

In-person presentations aside, acing a virtual presentation is of paramount importance in today’s digital world. Check out this guide to learn how you can adapt your in-person presentations into virtual presentations . 

Preparing an effective presentation starts with laying a strong foundation that goes beyond just creating slides and notes. One of the quickest and best ways to make a presentation would be with the help of a good presentation software . 

Otherwise, let me walk you to how to prepare for a presentation step by step and unlock the secrets of crafting a professional presentation that sets you apart.

1. Understand the audience and their needs

Before you dive into preparing your masterpiece, take a moment to get to know your target audience. Tailor your presentation to meet their needs and expectations , and you’ll have them hooked from the start!

2. Conduct thorough research on the topic

Time to hit the books (or the internet)! Don’t skimp on the research with your presentation materials — dive deep into the subject matter and gather valuable insights . The more you know, the more confident you’ll feel in delivering your presentation.

3. Organize the content with a clear structure

No one wants to stumble through a chaotic mess of information. Outline your presentation with a clear and logical flow. Start with a captivating introduction, follow up with main points that build on each other and wrap it up with a powerful conclusion that leaves a lasting impression.

Delivering an effective business presentation hinges on captivating your audience, and Venngage’s professionally designed business presentation templates are tailor-made for this purpose. With thoughtfully structured layouts, these templates enhance your message’s clarity and coherence, ensuring a memorable and engaging experience for your audience members.

Don’t want to build your presentation layout from scratch? pick from these 5 foolproof presentation layout ideas that won’t go wrong. 

4. Develop visually appealing and supportive visual aids

Spice up your presentation with eye-catching visuals! Create slides that complement your message, not overshadow it. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words, but that doesn’t mean you need to overload your slides with text.

Well-chosen designs create a cohesive and professional look, capturing your audience’s attention and enhancing the overall effectiveness of your message. Here’s a list of carefully curated PowerPoint presentation templates and great background graphics that will significantly influence the visual appeal and engagement of your presentation.

5. Practice, practice and practice

Practice makes perfect — rehearse your presentation and arrive early to your presentation to help overcome stage fright. Familiarity with your material will boost your presentation skills and help you handle curveballs with ease.

6. Seek feedback and make necessary adjustments

Don’t be afraid to ask for help and seek feedback from friends and colleagues. Constructive criticism can help you identify blind spots and fine-tune your presentation to perfection.

With Venngage’s real-time collaboration feature , receiving feedback and editing your presentation is a seamless process. Group members can access and work on the presentation simultaneously and edit content side by side in real-time. Changes will be reflected immediately to the entire team, promoting seamless teamwork.

7. Prepare for potential technical or logistical issues

Prepare for the unexpected by checking your equipment, internet connection and any other potential hiccups. If you’re worried that you’ll miss out on any important points, you could always have note cards prepared. Remember to remain focused and rehearse potential answers to anticipated questions.

8. Fine-tune and polish your presentation

As the big day approaches, give your presentation one last shine. Review your talking points, practice how to present a presentation and make any final tweaks. Deep breaths — you’re on the brink of delivering a successful presentation!

In competitive environments, persuasive presentations set individuals and organizations apart. To brush up on your presentation skills, read these guides on how to make a persuasive presentation and tips to presenting effectively . 

Whether you’re an experienced presenter or a novice, the right techniques will let your presentation skills soar to new heights!

From public speaking hacks to interactive elements and storytelling prowess, these 9 effective presentation techniques will empower you to leave a lasting impression on your audience and make your presentations unforgettable.

1. Confidence and positive body language

Positive body language instantly captivates your audience, making them believe in your message as much as you do. Strengthen your stage presence and own that stage like it’s your second home! Stand tall, shoulders back and exude confidence. 

2. Eye contact with the audience

Break down that invisible barrier and connect with your audience through their eyes. Maintaining eye contact when giving a presentation builds trust and shows that you’re present and engaged with them.

3. Effective use of hand gestures and movement

A little movement goes a long way! Emphasize key points with purposeful gestures and don’t be afraid to walk around the stage. Your energy will be contagious!

4. Utilize storytelling techniques

Weave the magic of storytelling into your presentation. Share relatable anecdotes, inspiring success stories or even personal experiences that tug at the heartstrings of your audience. Adjust your pitch, pace and volume to match the emotions and intensity of the story. Varying your speaking voice adds depth and enhances your stage presence.

5. Incorporate multimedia elements

Spice up your presentation with a dash of visual pizzazz! Use slides, images and video clips to add depth and clarity to your message. Just remember, less is more—don’t overwhelm them with information overload. 

Turn your presentations into an interactive party! Involve your audience with questions, polls or group activities. When they actively participate, they become invested in your presentation’s success. Bring your design to life with animated elements. Venngage allows you to apply animations to icons, images and text to create dynamic and engaging visual content.

6. Utilize humor strategically

Laughter is the best medicine—and a fantastic presentation enhancer! A well-placed joke or lighthearted moment can break the ice and create a warm atmosphere , making your audience more receptive to your message.

7. Practice active listening and respond to feedback

Be attentive to your audience’s reactions and feedback. If they have questions or concerns, address them with genuine interest and respect. Your responsiveness builds rapport and shows that you genuinely care about their experience.

8. Apply the 10-20-30 rule

Apply the 10-20-30 presentation rule and keep it short, sweet and impactful! Stick to ten slides, deliver your presentation within 20 minutes and use a 30-point font to ensure clarity and focus. Less is more, and your audience will thank you for it!

9. Implement the 5-5-5 rule

Simplicity is key. Limit each slide to five bullet points, with only five words per bullet point and allow each slide to remain visible for about five seconds. This rule keeps your presentation concise and prevents information overload.

Simple presentations are more engaging because they are easier to follow. Summarize your presentations and keep them simple with Venngage’s gallery of simple presentation templates and ensure that your message is delivered effectively across your audience.

1. How to start a presentation?

To kick off your presentation effectively, begin with an attention-grabbing statement or a powerful quote. Introduce yourself, establish credibility and clearly state the purpose and relevance of your presentation.

2. How to end a presentation?

For a strong conclusion, summarize your talking points and key takeaways. End with a compelling call to action or a thought-provoking question and remember to thank your audience and invite any final questions or interactions.

3. How to make a presentation interactive?

To make your presentation interactive, encourage questions and discussion throughout your talk. Utilize multimedia elements like videos or images and consider including polls, quizzes or group activities to actively involve your audience.

In need of inspiration for your next presentation? I’ve got your back! Pick from these 120+ presentation ideas, topics and examples to get started. 

Creating a stunning presentation with Venngage is a breeze with our user-friendly drag-and-drop editor and professionally designed templates for all your communication needs. 

Here’s how to make a presentation in just 5 simple steps with the help of Venngage:

Step 1: Sign up for Venngage for free using your email, Gmail or Facebook account or simply log in to access your account. 

Step 2: Pick a design from our selection of free presentation templates (they’re all created by our expert in-house designers).

Step 3: Make the template your own by customizing it to fit your content and branding. With Venngage’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor, you can easily modify text, change colors and adjust the layout to create a unique and eye-catching design.

Step 4: Elevate your presentation by incorporating captivating visuals. You can upload your images or choose from Venngage’s vast library of high-quality photos, icons and illustrations. 

Step 5: Upgrade to a premium or business account to export your presentation in PDF and print it for in-person presentations or share it digitally for free!

By following these five simple steps, you’ll have a professionally designed and visually engaging presentation ready in no time. With Venngage’s user-friendly platform, your presentation is sure to make a lasting impression. So, let your creativity flow and get ready to shine in your next presentation!

Blog > Tips for good PowerPoint Presentations

Tips for good PowerPoint Presentations

08.14.21   •  #powerpoint #tips.

If you know how to do it, it's actually not that difficult to create and give a good presentation.

That's why we have some examples of good PowerPoint presentations for you and tips that are going to make your next presentation a complete success.

1. Speak freely

One of the most important points in good presentations is to speak freely. Prepare your presentation so well that you can speak freely and rarely, if ever, need to look at your notes. The goal is to connect with your audience and get them excited about your topic. If you speak freely, this is much easier than if you just read your text out. You want your audience to feel engaged in your talk. Involve them and tell your text in a vivid way.

2. Familiarize yourself with the technology

In order to be able to speak freely, it is important to prepare the text well and to engage with the topic in detail.

However, it is at least as important to familiarize yourself with the location’s technology before your presentation and to start your PowerPoint there as well. It is annoying if technical problems suddenly occur during your presentation, as this interrupts your flow of speech and distracts the audience from the topic. Avoid this by checking everything before you start your talk and eliminate any technical problems so that you can give your presentation undisturbed.

• Don't forget the charging cable for your laptop
• Find out beforehand how you can connect your laptop to the beamer. Find out which connection the beamer has and which connection your laptop has. To be on the safe side, take an adapter with you.
• Always have backups of your presentation. Save them on a USB stick and preferably also online in a cloud.
• Take a second laptop and maybe even your own small projector for emergencies. Even if it's not the latest model and the quality is not that good: better bad quality than no presentation at all.

3. Get the attention of your audience

Especially in long presentations it is often difficult to keep the attention of your audience. It is important to make your presentation interesting and to actively involve the audience. Try to make your topic as exciting as possible and captivate your audience.

Our tip: Include interactive polls or quizzes in your presentation to involve your audience and increase their attention. With the help of SlideLizard, you can ask questions in PowerPoint and your audience can easily vote on their own smartphone. Plus, you can even get anonymous feedback at the end, so you know right away what you can improve next time.

Here we have also summarized further tips for you on how to increase audience engagement.

4. Hold eye contact

You want your audience to feel engaged in your presentation, so it is very important to hold eye contact. Avoid staring only at a part of the wall or at your paper. Speak to your audience, involve them in your presentation and make it more exciting.

But also make sure you don't always look at the same two or three people, but address everyone. If the audience is large, it is often difficult to include everyone, but still try to let your eyes wander a little between your listeners and look into every corner of the room.

5. Speaking coherently

In a good presentation it is important to avoid jumping from one topic to the next and back again shortly afterwards. Otherwise your audience will not be able to follow you after a while and their thoughts will wander. To prevent this, it is important that your presentation has a good structure and that you work through one topic after the other.

Nervousness can cause even the best to mumble or talk too fast in order to get the presentation over with as quickly as possible. Try to avoid this by taking short pauses to collect yourself, to breathe and to remind yourself to speak slowly.

6. Matching colors

An attractive design of your PowerPoint is also an important point for giving good presentations. Make sure that your slides are not too colorful. A PowerPoint in which all kinds of colors are combined with each other does not look professional, but rather suitable for a children's birthday party.

Think about a rough color palette in advance, which you can then use in your presentation. Colors such as orange or neon green do not look so good in your PowerPoint. Use colors specifically to emphasize important information.

To create good PowerPoint slides it is also essential to choose colors that help the text to read well. You should have as much contrast as possible between the font and the background. Black writing on a white background is always easy to read, while yellow writing on a white background is probably hard to read.

7. Slide design should not be too minimalistic

Even though it is often said that "less is more", you should not be too minimalistic in the design of your presentation. A presentation where your slides are blank and only black text on a white background is likely to go down just as badly as if you use too many colors.

Empty presentations are boring and don't really help to capture the attention of your audience. It also looks like you are too lazy to care about the design of your presentation and that you have not put any effort into the preparation. Your PowerPoint doesn't have to be overflowing with colors, animations and images to make it look interesting. Make it simple, but also professional.

8. Write only key points on the slides

If you want to create a good presentation, it is important to remember that your slides should never be overcrowded. Write only the most important key points on your slides and never entire sentences. Your audience should not be able to read the exact text you are speaking in your PowerPoint. This is rather annoying and leads to being bored quickly. Summarize the most important things that your audience should remember and write them down in short bullet points on your presentation. Then go into the key points in more detail in your speech and explain more about them.

9. Do not overdo it with animations

Do never use too many animations. It looks messy, confusing and definitely not professional if every text and image is displayed with a different animation. Just leave out animations at all or if you really want to use them then use them only very rarely when you want to draw attention to something specific. Make sure that if you use animations, they are consistent. If you use transitions between the individual slides, these should also always be kept consistent and simple.

10. Use images

Pictures and graphics in presentations are always a good idea to illustrate something and to add some variety. They help keep your audience's attention and make it easier to remember important information. But don't overdo it with them. Too many pictures can distract from your presentation and look messy. Make sure the graphics also fit the content and, if you have used several images on one slide, ask yourself if you really need all of them.

11. Choose a suitable font

Never combine too many fonts so that your presentation does not look messy. Use at most two: one for headings and one for text. When choosing fonts, you should also make sure that they are still legible at long distances. Script, italic and decorative fonts are very slow to read, which is why they should be avoided in presentations.

It is not so easy to choose the right font. Therefore, we have summarized for you how to find the best font for your PowerPoint presentation.

12. Do not use images as background

In a good presentation it is important to be able to read the text on the slides easily and quickly. Therefore, do not use images as slide backgrounds if there is also text on them. The picture only distracts from the text and it is difficult to read it because there is not much contrast with the background. It is also harder to see the image because the text in the foreground is distracting. The whole thing looks messy and distracting rather than informative and clear.

13. Never read out the text from your slides

Never just read the exact text from your slides. Your audience can read for themselves, so they will only get bored and in the worst case it will lead to "Death by PowerPoint". You may also give them the feeling that you think they are not able to read for themselves. In addition, you should avoid whole sentences on your slides anyway. List key points that your audience can read along. Then go into more detail and explain more about them.

14. Don't turn your back

Never turn around during your presentation to look at your projected PowerPoint. Not to read from your slides, but also not to make sure the next slide is already displayed. It looks unprofessional and only distracts your audience.

In PowerPoint's Speaker View, you can always see which slide is currently being displayed and which one is coming next. Use this to make sure the order fits. You can even take notes in PowerPoint, which are then displayed during your presentation. You can read all about notes in PowerPoint here.

15. Do not forget about the time

In a good presentation, it is important to always be aware of the given time and to stick to it. It is annoying when your presentation takes much longer than actually planned and your audience is just waiting for you to stop talking or you are not able to finish your presentation at all. It is just as awkward if your presentation is too short. You have already told everything about your topic, but you should actually talk for at least another ten minutes.

Practice your presentation often enough at home. Talk through your text and time yourself as you go. Then adjust the length so that you can keep to the time given on the day of your presentation.

16. Avoid a complicated structure

The structure of a good presentation should not be complicated. Your audience should be able to follow you easily and remember the essential information by the end. When you have finished a part, briefly summarize and repeat the main points before moving on to the next topic. Mention important information more than once to make sure it really gets across to your audience.

However, if the whole thing gets too complicated, it can be easy for your audience to disengage after a while and not take away much new information from your presentation.

17. Choose appropriate clothes

On the day of your presentation, be sure to choose appropriate clothing. Your appearance should be formal, so avoid casual clothes and stick to professional dress codes. When choosing your clothes, also make sure that they are rather unobtrusive. Your audience should focus on your presentation, not on your appearance.

18. Adapt your presentation to your audience

Think about who your audience is and adapt your presentation to them. Find out how much they already know about the topic, what they want to learn about it and why they are here in the first place. If you only talk about things your audience already knows, they will get bored pretty soon, but if you throw around a lot of technical terms when your audience has hardly dealt with the topic at all, they will also have a hard time following you. So to give a successful and good presentation, it is important to adapt it to your audience.

You can also ask a few questions at the beginning of your presentation to learn more about your audience and then adapt your presentation. With SlideLizard , you can integrate polls directly into your PowerPoint and participants can then easily answer anonymously from their smartphone.

19. Mention only the most important information

Keep it short and limit yourself to the essentials. The more facts and information you present to your audience, the less they will remember.

Also be sure to leave out information that does not fit the topic or is not relevant. You will only distract from the actual topic and lose the attention of your audience. The time your audience can concentrate and listen with attention is rather short anyway, so don't waste it by telling unimportant information.

20. Talk about your topic in an exciting way

Tell compelling and exciting stories to make your presentation really good. If you speak in a monotone voice all the time, you are likely to lose the attention of your audience. Make your narration lively and exciting. Also, be careful not to speak too quietly, but not too loudly either. People should be able to understand you well throughout the whole room. Even if it is not easy for many people, try to deliver your speech with confidence. If you are enthusiastic about the topic yourself, it is much easier to get your audience excited about it.

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About the author.

Helena Reitinger

Helena supports the SlideLizard team in marketing and design. She loves to express her creativity in texts and graphics.

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Principles of Presentation: All You Need to Know About

Uncover the essence of the Principles of Presentation. Explore the dynamics behind effective presentations as we delve into the power of storytelling, understanding your audience, creating a captivating visual appeal, keeping your message concise, delivering it engagingly, incorporating data and evidence, and mastering the art of storyboarding and practice.

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Whether you are a student, a professional, or an entrepreneur, understanding these rules can help you enhance your overall Presentation style. In this blog, we will delve into the Principles of Presentation and equip you with the knowledge to create content that captivates your audience. 

Table of Contents  

1) What are the Principles of Presentation? 

     a) The power of storytelling 

     b) Knowing your audience 

     c) Having a visual appeal 

     d) Keeping it concise 

     e) Having an engaging delivery 

     f) Incorporating data and evidence 

     g) Storyboarding and practice 

2) Conclusion 

What are the Principles of Presentation?  

The power of storytelling  

Storytelling is an ancient art form that has stood the test of time. Stories, from ancient legends to modern-day movies and books, have always captivated human minds. When it comes to Presentations, the power of storytelling lies in its ability to develop an emotional connection with the audience. You can also understand by principles of presentations by going through presentation skills interview questions and answers . 

People remember stories much better than dry facts and figures. When you prepare a presentation , consider weaving your content into a narrative to make it more relatable, memorable, and engaging. By sharing anecdotes, personal experiences, or even fictional scenarios, you can illustrate your points effectively and leave a lasting impression on your listeners. 

Knowing your audience  

Understanding your audience is a cornerstone of successful Presentations. Tailoring your content to your audience's needs, interests, and preferences ensures that your message resonates deeply with them. 

Start Your Presentation by identifying who your audience is. Are they students, colleagues, potential customers, or a mix of individuals from different backgrounds? Understanding their demographics and their prior knowledge of the topic will help you gauge the level of detail and complexity your Presentation should have.

Once you've identified your audience, dig deeper to discover their pain points or challenges. Ask questions like, what issues are they facing that your Presentation can help address? By addressing these pain points and providing solutions, you show your audience that you value their concerns and are here to help. 

Unlock your full potential as a presenter with our Presentation Skills Training – join now!  

Having a visual appeal  

In a society brimming with information, visual elements play an ever-essential role in keeping your audience engaged and focused on your Presentation. Enhance your Presentation with relevant images, infographics, charts, and videos. Visuals break the monotony of text-heavy slides and stimulate the audience's visual senses, making your content more memorable. 

Also, take care to ensure that your visual design is consistent throughout the Presentation. Use the same colour palette, font styles, and layout. A cluttered slide can be overwhelming, so keep it simple, ensuring that each element supports your message without distracting you from it. 

Keeping it concise  

Attention spans are limited in the modern, fast-paced society. Keeping your Presentation concise and to the point is essential to maintain your audience's interest. 

Respect your audience's time by focusing on the core message and key takeaways. Avoid going off-topic or getting bogged down in unnecessary details. Take care to organise your content with clear and concise bullet points. Bullet points break down information into smaller chunks, making it easier for your audience to absorb the main ideas. 

Having an engaging delivery  

A compelling Presentation not only depends on the content but also on how you deliver it. Your delivery style can influence your audience's level of engagement and interest. 

Confidence is key when presenting. Practice your Presentation multiple times to familiarise yourself with the content and overcome nervousness. Work on your body language, voice modulation, and eye contact to keep your audience connected. Understanding various elements of presentation becomes crucial. 

You can also encourage audience participation by incorporating questions, polls, or interactive activities. Engaging your audience in this way creates a dynamic and lively atmosphere, making the Presentation more enjoyable and memorable. 

Take your Presentations to the next level with our Effective Presentation Skills & Techniques Course – sign up today!  

Incorporating data and evidence  

Supporting your arguments with data and evidence adds credibility to your Presentation and makes your points more convincing. Whether it's statistical data, research findings, or case studies, using relevant data provides a solid foundation for your arguments. Your audience is more likely to trust and retain information when credible sources back it. 

Storyboarding and practice  

One of the crucial Principles of Presentation is storyboarding and practice. Behind every successful Presentation is careful planning and practice. Storyboarding helps you organise your content effectively, while practice ensures a smooth and confident delivery. 

To practice storyboarding, create a detailed storyboard that outlines the structure of your Presentation, including the main points, supporting evidence, and visual elements. A well-structured storyboard serves as your roadmap, ensuring that you cover all essential aspects of your topic. 

Make sure to practice delivering your Presentation in front of a mirror, friends, or family. Pay attention to timing, pace, and transitions between sections. Moreover, rehearsing will help you identify areas for improvement and build your confidence. 

Captivating openings and closings  

The first and last moments of your Presentation are crucial for making a strong impact on your audience. Start your Presentation with a hook – a thought-provoking question, a surprising fact, or a compelling story. An engaging opening captures the audience's attention from the beginning, setting the tone for the rest of the Presentation. It becomes important to understand that advantages and disadvantages of presentation to build captivating openings and closings.

You must also make sure that you end your Presentation with a memorable closing statement or a powerful call to action. Leave your audience with a clear takeaway or a next step they can follow after the Presentation. A strong closing ensures that your message lingers in their minds long after the Presentation is over. 

Conclusion  

Overall, mastering the Principles of Presentation is an invaluable skill that can elevate your communication abilities to new heights. By storytelling, knowing your audience, utilising visuals, delivering engagingly and supporting your points with data, you can Improve Your Presentation Skills to create impactful and appealing presentations that leave a lasting impression.

Want to master the art of impactful Presentations? Explore our Presentation Skills Courses and elevate your communication prowess!  

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Complete Guide for Effective Presentations, with Examples

July 9, 2018 - Dom Barnard

During a presentation you aim to look confident, enthusiastic and natural. You’ll need more than good words and content to achieve this – your delivery plays a significant part. In this article, we discuss various techniques that can be used to deliver an effective presentation.

Effective presentations

Think about if you were in the audience, what would:

• Get you to focus and listen
• Make you understand
• Activate your imagination
• Persuade you

Providing the audience with interesting information is not enough to achieve these aims – you need to ensure that the way you present is stimulating and engaging. If it’s not, you’ll lose the audience’s interest and they’ll stop listening.

Tips for an Effective Presentation

Professional public speakers spend hours creating and practicing presentations. These are the delivery techniques they consider:

Keep it simple

You shouldn’t overwhelm your audience with information – ensure that you’re clear, concise and that you get to the point so they can understand your message.

Have a maximum of  three main points  and state them at the beginning, before you explain them in more depth, and then state them at the end so the audience will at least remember these points.

If some of your content doesn’t contribute to your key message then cut it out. Also avoid using too many statistics and technical terminology.

Connect with your audience

One of the greatest difficulties when delivering a presentation is connecting with the audience. If you don’t  connect with them  it will seem as though you’re talking to an empty room.

Trying to make contact with the audience makes them feel like they’re part of the presentation which encourages them to listen and it shows that you want to speak to them.

Eye contact and smile

Avoiding eye contact is uncomfortable because it make you look insecure. When you  maintain eye contact  the audience feels like you’re speaking to them personally. If this is something you struggle with, try looking at people’s foreheads as it gives the impression of making eye contact.

Try to cover all sections of the audience and don’t move on to the next person too quickly as you will look nervous.

Smiling also helps with rapport and it reduces your nerves because you’ll feel less like you’re talking to group of faceless people. Make sure you don’t turn the lights down too much before your presentation so you can all clearly see each other.

Body language

Be aware of your body language and use it to connect:

• Keep your arms uncrossed so your  body language is more open .
• Match your facial expressions with what you’re saying.
• Avoid fidgeting and displaying nervous habits, such as, rocking on your feet.
• You may need to glance at the computer slide or a visual aid but make sure you predominantly face the audience.
• Emphasise points by using hand gestures but use them sparingly – too little and they’ll awkwardly sit at your side, too much and you’ll be distracting and look nervous.
• Vary your gestures so you don’t look robotic.
• Maintain a straight posture.
• Be aware of  cultural differences .

Move around

Avoid standing behind the lectern or computer because you need to reduce the distance and barriers between yourself and the audience.  Use movement  to increase the audience’s interest and make it easier to follow your presentation.

A common technique for incorporating movement into your presentation is to:

• Start your introduction by standing in the centre of the stage.
• For your first point you stand on the left side of the stage.
• You discuss your second point from the centre again.
• You stand on the right side of the stage for your third point.
• The conclusion occurs in the centre.

Watch 3 examples of good and bad movement while presenting

Example: Movement while presenting

Your movement at the front of the class and amongst the listeners can help with engagement. Think about which of these three speakers maintains the attention of their audience for longer, and what they are doing differently to each other.

Speak with the audience

You can conduct polls using your audience or ask questions to make them think and feel invested in your presentation. There are three different types of questions:

Direct questions require an answer: “What would you do in this situation?” These are mentally stimulating for the audience. You can pass a microphone around and let the audience come to your desired solution.

Rhetorical questions  do not require answers, they are often used to emphasises an idea or point: “Is the Pope catholic?

Loaded questions contain an unjustified assumption made to prompt the audience into providing a particular answer which you can then correct to support your point: You may ask “Why does your wonderful company have such a low incidence of mental health problems?” The audience will generally answer that they’re happy.

After receiving the answers you could then say “Actually it’s because people are still unwilling and too embarrassed to seek help for mental health issues at work etc.”

Be specific with your language

Make the audience feel as though you are speaking to each member individually by using “you” and “your.”

For example: asking “Do you want to lose weight without feeling hungry?” would be more effective than asking “Does anyone here want to lost weight without feeling hungry?” when delivering your presentation. You can also increase solidarity by using “we”, “us” etc – it makes the audience think “we’re in this together”.

Be flexible

Be prepared to adapt to the situation at the time, for example, if the audience seems bored you can omit details and go through the material faster, if they are confused then you will need to come up with more examples on the spot for clarification. This doesn’t mean that you weren’t prepared because you can’t predict everything.

Vocal variety

How you say something is just as is important as the content of your speech – arguably, more so.

For example, if an individual presented on a topic very enthusiastically the audience would probably enjoy this compared to someone who covered more points but mumbled into their notes.

• Adapt your voice  depending on what are you’re saying – if you want to highlight something then raise your voice or lower it for intensity. Communicate emotion by using your voice.
• Avoid speaking in monotone as you will look uninterested and the audience will lose interest.
• Take time to pronounce every word carefully.
• Raise your pitch when asking questions and lower it when you want to sound severe.
• Sound enthusiastic – the more you sound like you care about the topic, the more the audience will listen. Smiling and pace can help with this.
• Speak loudly and clearly – think about projecting your voice to the back of the room.
• Speak at a  pace that’s easy to follow . If you’re too fast or too slow it will be difficult for the audience to understand what you’re saying and it’s also frustrating. Subtly fasten the pace to show enthusiasm and slow down for emphasis, thoughtfulness or caution.

Prior to the presentation, ensure that you  prepare your vocal chords :

• You could read aloud a book that requires vocal variety, such as, a children’s book.
• Avoid dairy and eating or drinking anything too sugary beforehand as mucus can build-up leading to frequent throat clearing.
• Don’t drink anything too cold before you present as this can constrict your throat which affects vocal quality.
• Some people suggest a warm cup of tea beforehand to relax the throat.

Practice Presentation Skills

Improve your public speaking and presentation skills by practicing them in realistic environments, with automated feedback on performance. Learn More

Pause to breathe

When you’re anxious your breathing will become quick and shallow which will affect the control you have on your voice. This can consequently make you feel more nervous. You want to breathe steadily and deeply so before you start speaking take some deep breaths or implement controlled breathing.

Controlled breathing is a common technique that helps slow down your breathing to normal thus reducing your anxiety. If you think this may be useful practice with these steps:

• Sit down in an upright position as it easier for your lungs to fill with air
• Breathe in through your nose and into your abdomen for four seconds
• Hold this breathe for two seconds
• Breathe out through your nose for six seconds
• Wait a few seconds before inhaling and repeating the cycle

It takes practice to master this technique but once you get used to it you may want to implement it directly before your presentation.

Completely filling your lungs during a pause will ensure you reach a greater vocal range.

During the presentation delivery, if you notice that you’re speaking too quickly then pause and breathe. This won’t look strange – it will appear as though you’re giving thought to what you’re saying. You can also strategically plan some of your pauses, such as after questions and at the end of sections, because this will give you a chance to calm down and it will also give the audience an opportunity to think and reflect.

Pausing will also help you  avoid filler words , such as, “um” as well which can make you sound unsure.

• 10 Effective Ways to use Pauses in your Speech

Strong opening

The first five minutes are  vital to engage the audience  and get them listening to you. You could start with a story to highlight why your topic is significant.

For example, if the topic is on the benefits of pets on physical and psychological health, you could present a story or a study about an individual whose quality of life significantly improved after being given a dog. The audience is more likely to respond better to this and remember this story than a list of facts.

Example: Which presentation intro keeps you engaged?

Watch 5 different presentation introductions, from both virtual and in-person events. Notice how it can only take a few seconds to decide if you want to keep listening or switch off. For the good introductions, what about them keeps you engaged?

More experienced and confident public speakers use humour in their presentations. The audience will be incredibly engaged if you make them laugh but caution must be exercised when using humour because a joke can be misinterpreted and even offend the audience.

Only use jokes if you’re confident with this technique, it has been successful in the past and it’s suitable for the situation.

Stories and anecdotes

Use stories whenever you can and judge whether you can tell a story about yourself because the audience are even more interested in seeing the human side of you.

Consider telling a story about a mistake you made, for example, perhaps you froze up during an important presentation when you were 25, or maybe life wasn’t going well for you in the past – if relevant to your presentation’s aim. People will relate to this as we have all experienced mistakes and failures. The more the audience relates to you, the more likely they will remain engaged.

These stories can also be  told in a humorous way  if it makes you feel more comfortable and because you’re disclosing a personal story there is less chance of misinterpretation compared to telling a joke.

Anecdotes are especially valuable for your introduction and between different sections of the presentation because they engage the audience. Ensure that you plan the stories thoroughly beforehand and that they are not too long.

Focus on the audience’s needs

Even though your aim is to persuade the audience, they must also get something helpful from the presentation. Provide the audience with value by giving them useful information, tactics, tips etc. They’re more likely to warm to you and trust you if you’re sharing valuable information with them.

You could also highlight their pain point. For example, you might ask “Have you found it difficult to stick to a healthy diet?” The audience will now want to remain engaged because they want to know the solution and the opportunities that you’re offering.

Use visual aids

Visual aids are items of a visual manner, such as graphs, photographs, video clips etc used in addition to spoken information. Visual aids are chosen depending on their purpose, for example, you may want to:

• Summarise information.
• Reduce the amount of spoken words, for example, you may show a graph of your results rather than reading them out.
• Clarify and show examples.
• Create more of an impact. You must consider what type of impact you want to make beforehand – do you want the audience to be sad, happy, angry etc?
• Emphasise what you’re saying.
• Make a point memorable.
• Enhance your credibility.
• Engage the audience and maintain their interest.
• Make something easier for the audience to understand.

Some general tips for  using visual aids :

• Think about how can a visual aid can support your message. What do you want the audience to do?
• Ensure that your visual aid follows what you’re saying or this will confuse the audience.
• Avoid cluttering the image as it may look messy and unclear.
• Visual aids must be clear, concise and of a high quality.
• Keep the style consistent, such as, the same font, colours, positions etc
• Use graphs and charts to present data.
• The audience should not be trying to read and listen at the same time – use visual aids to highlight your points.
• One message per visual aid, for example, on a slide there should only be one key point.
• Use visual aids in moderation – they are additions meant to emphasise and support main points.
• Ensure that your presentation still works without your visual aids in case of technical problems.

10-20-30 slideshow rule

Slideshows are widely used for presentations because it’s easy to create attractive and professional presentations using them. Guy Kawasaki, an entrepreneur and author, suggests that slideshows should  follow a 10-20-30 rule :

• There should be a maximum of 10 slides – people rarely remember more than one concept afterwards so there’s no point overwhelming them with unnecessary information.
• The presentation should last no longer than 20 minutes as this will leave time for questions and discussion.
• The font size should be a minimum of 30pt because the audience reads faster than you talk so less information on the slides means that there is less chance of the audience being distracted.

If you want to give the audience more information you can provide them with partially completed handouts or give them the handouts after you’ve delivered the presentation.

Keep a drink nearby

Have something to drink when you’re on stage, preferably water at room temperature. This will help maintain your vocal quality and having a sip is a subtle way of introducing pauses.

Practice, practice, practice

If you are very familiar with the content of your presentation, your audience will perceive you as confident and you’ll be more persuasive.

• Don’t just read the presentation through – practice everything,  including your transitions  and using your visual aids.
• Stand up and speak it aloud, in an engaging manner, as though you were presenting to an audience.
• Ensure that you practice your body language and gesturing.
• Use VR to  practice in a realistic environment .
• Practice in front of others and get their feedback.
• Freely improvise so you’ll sound more natural on the day. Don’t learn your presentation verbatim because you will sound uninterested and if you lose focus then you may forget everything.
• Create cards to use as cues – one card should be used for one key idea. Write down brief notes or key words and ensure that the cards are physically connected so the order cannot be lost. Visual prompts can also be used as cues.

This video shows how you can practice presentations in virtual reality. See our  VR training courses .

Two courses where you can practice your presentations in interactive exercises:

• Essential Public Speaking
• How to Present over Video

Try these different presentation delivery methods to see which ones you prefer and which need to be improved. The most important factor is to feel comfortable during the presentation as the delivery is likely to be better.

Remember that the audience are generally on your side – they want you to do well so present with confidence.

• Public Speaking
• Confident Presenter

The Five Key Principles For Powerful Presentations

by Andrea Pacini — Tuesday 26 July 2022

Most business leaders fail to follow set principles for creating and delivering their presentations. In not doing so they are making a fundamental mistake.

Some think it’s primarily about creating slides on PowerPoint. They think if they get a decent deck together then they are good to go.

If you are one of those people who spend most of your preparation time working on PowerPoint slides (or any other presentation tool), you’ve missed the point. There is so much more to focus on than PowerPoint.

What is far more important is your ability to pitch, present and communicate your ideas so you can achieve your objectives. The aim might be to win more deals, make more sales, inspire and motivate your team, increase your credibility or reputation — or make progress in your career.

Think about it. There are so many other areas of life which require us to follow some clear principles — and we would never think to do otherwise.

If you wanted to learn how to play a new musical instrument, you would spend time working on fingering or breathing and learning scales.

To master a new sport you would need to know the rules of the game and the basic techniques. For racket sports and golf, for example, you would work on your swing. All of that is more important than having the latest equipment.

Why is it that if we want to learn or get better at presenting, we ignore the fundamental principles of communication?

Those who ignore the fundamental principles will continue to deliver presentations that waste their own time and that of the audience. Plus, there will be no desired action from the audience and the objectives will not be achieved.

Principles First; PowerPoint Last

If you want your audience to take action and you want to use presentations to gain a competitive advantage in your business, you have to accept there are fundamental principles to follow. A presentation is so much more than PowerPoint.

Focusing on the tool (PowerPoint) rather than the principles is like worrying about your mic before learning how to sing.

Jeff Bezos once said that he is often asked what will change in the next ten years, but rarely what is not going to change in the next ten years. He believes that it is the second question which is more important — and advises people to ‘focus on the things that don’t change.’

In the case of Amazon, Bezos realised that people will always want low prices, fast delivery and vast selection. There is a business opportunity in embracing what you know will remain constant.

With presentations we should take heed of Jeff Bezos’s observation and also focus on the things that don’t change. The tools and technology we use to communicate our ideas will change. Presentation software, like PowerPoint, will continue to advance. However, the fundamental principles of good presentations will never change.

No one is going to come up to you in ten years’ time and say, “Great presentation, I just wish it was more complex / I wish it was much longer / I wish the structure wasn’t that clear / I wish it wasn’t so relevant to me and my needs / I just wish it was more boring.”

If you follow the right principles consistently, you will become the presenter everyone remembers. Your presentations will give you a competitive advantage which will allow you to achieve your personal and professional objectives.

The Five Key Principles

There are five principles for powerful presentations. Remember the word SCORE . Just like in football you want to SCORE when you give a presentation:

SIMPLE: The more you say, the less they remember, so keep it short, simple and to the point.

CLEAR: Your objectives and key messages should be obvious to everybody — including you.

ORIGINAL: Make your presentation stand out, and people will remember it for longer.

RELATED: Think about your audience and relate everything back to them. Think of it as the audience’s presentation. Make it relevant and useful for your audience.

ENJOYABLE: If the audience enjoys your talk, they will pay more attention, remember more and take action.

The magic happens when you apply these five principles to each of the three key arts of presenting. The three arts are:

• Your message: what you say
• Your delivery: how you say it
• Your visuals: what you show when you say it

Each of these (Message, Visuals and Delivery) can and should meet the five principles so that your presentations will be Simple, Clear, Original, Related and Enjoyable from any perspective.

If one of these three key elements is missing, you will find it hard to achieve your goals for the presentation. Think about how movies are put together. Any successful movie has a great plot (which is like the message), superb acting (which is the delivery) and stunning special effects or beautiful cinematography (the visuals). A movie which is lacking any of those elements will not be as enjoyable. The same is true for a presentation.

I previously worked with Bryan MacMillan, the Founder and CEO of TyreRunner.com, which is a price comparison site for car tyres.

Although Bryan is a naturally confident guy, being from a technical background, he had a tendency to be too detailed in his presentations. He admitted that he tended to jump straight into PowerPoint. When he delivered his presentations he often found that he was losing the audience’s interest.

He wanted to learn how to deliver an interactive presentation which would stand out, generate interest in his business and open the doors to new opportunities.

We helped Bryan to learn how to adopt a framework to put together a presentation which focused on his audience. He quickly realised that he needed to spend more time on idea creation and then editing down what he wanted to say.

Bryan’s feedback was that he felt far more confident after sticking to a framework. He is now regularly delivering great presentations with great confidence, drawing on his toolbox which gives him consistency.

Seven Steps For Better Presentations

How do you apply all this in practice? For your next presentation, here are seven steps you need to follow to be better prepared. If you follow these your presentations will improve dramatically.

• Analyse your audience

Your presentations must relate to your audience. Before opening up PowerPoint or thinking about your key messages, ask yourself some questions about your audience. What are their needs? What is the context of the presentation?

• Define a clear objective

What do you want your audience to believe, feel or do after your presentation? Tailor your presentation accordingly.

• Brainstorm to identify your key messages

Forget about technology, go analogue: pen and paper, whiteboards, flipcharts.

• Simplify your message

Your message needs to be simple for the audience to understand. What is the key message your audience really needs to take away from your presentation? Write it down in a maximum of 70 words.

• Develop a clear storyline

Translate the ideas from the previous brainstorming session into a storyline that makes it easy for the audience to follow you and remember what you say.

• Make it original and enjoyable

Tell them stories. People remember examples and anecdotes far better than naked facts and figures.

Rehearse a few times before the actual presentation and you’ll shine.

Follow these steps consistently and you will become the best presenter you can be.

Rooted In Science

A presentation is a mix of art and science. There has been lots of research into how an audience member’s brain works. Thanks to science we know something about how to keep an audiences’ attention and how to achieve high engagement and comprehension.

Science can tell us what works and what doesn’t when we communicate our ideas.

The principles outlined in this article are rooted in what science tells us.

If you want to delve more deeply into the science behind presenting, I interviewed Dr John Medina (author of Brain Rules) on the Ideas on Stage podcast.

If you are one of those business leaders who fires up PowerPoint as the starting point for a presentation, you are making a mistake.

You can produce a much better presentation by employing some key principles in your preparation which you stick to each time.

It is far better to start with just a pen and paper and really think about your audience and what message you want to get across.

There are five key principles for any great presentation which you can remember with the word SCORE — keep it SIMPLE, make your messages CLEAR, make it ORIGINAL, keep it RELATED to your audience and make sure it is ENJOYABLE for them.

Apply those five principles to the three key arts of presenting — the MESSAGE, the VISUALS and the DELIVERY.

Bring everything back to the audience and what you want to achieve, brainstorm good ideas, simplify everything down — and then rehearse.

Once you have a system in place, use it every time to make better presentations, and you will achieve your personal and business goals.

If this article has helped you please get in touch to let me know. If you feel any colleagues or friends might also benefit from reading it, feel free to share the article.

If you want to become a more confident presenter, take the Confident Presenter Scorecard . Answer simple Yes/No questions, get an instant score plus suggestions for improvement. It takes less than 3 minutes. Once you complete the scorecard, you’ll receive a free pdf copy of my best-selling book Confident Presenter .

How do you design a good presentation?

Presentations are an integral part of our workplace experience. Whether you’re presenting a project at an all-hands meeting or giving an informal presentation during a weekly check-in, presentations are a cornerstone of how we work.

Despite how often we give presentations, designing one can feel pretty daunting. After all, we’re under pressure to create something informative, to-the-point, and visually appealing — and we have to deliver it in front of an audience!

In this blog post, we’ll go over some basic principles of presentation design, including tips for designing a great presentation and layout designs you can use for your own work. By the end of the blog, you’ll have the confidence and ability to design presentations that shine.

• Presentation design principles

Designing a presentation can feel overwhelming. When you have a lot to say but a short amount of time to say it, deciding what to include (and how to present it) can be a daunting task. Here are three principles to think about when you’re designing your next presentation.

Know your audience

Everything about your presentation — what you include, what you don’t, how to lay it out — will depend on your audience. As you start planning your presentation, ask yourself a few questions. Who is your audience? How much do they know about this topic? What is the context in which they’ll be listening to your presentation?

For example, let’s say you’re a content marketing manager giving a presentation about an editorial calendar. If you’re designing that presentation for a product marketer, it’s going to look and sound differently than if you were designing it for an engineer; you might choose to emphasize or explain different elements with fonts or graphics. Let your audience drive your design.

Employ a visual hierarchy

When you sit down to create a presentation, you have a lot of creative tools at your disposal. It’s easy to get carried away with colors, fonts, animations, and builds. That’s why it’s important to employ a visual hierarchy for each slide.

A visual hierarchy is how you choose to arrange the information on your slide so that its importance is immediately clear to your audience. Visual hierarchies impact your font sizes, titles, the colors and animation you use, whether your text is bold or italic, whether you use images, and more.

For your first slide in your deck, start by jotting down what you want people to get out of this part of your presentation. Then arrange the elements on your slide to emphasize those key points.

Design accessibly

It’s important to remember that not everyone in the audience will consume information in the same way. Some people are auditory learners, while others are more visual. Some audience members might have visual or hearing impairments. And some simply might not be able to see the presentation very well from where they’re sitting. An important part of designing good presentations is designing accessible presentations.

Fortunately, there are a couple of rules of thumb that can help you design more accessible presentations. For one, don’t use color as the only method for distinguishing information. That makes it harder for visually impaired participants to follow your presentation. Use bold typefaces, different fonts, or larger text to highlight that something is important.

In general, use large, simple, san serif fonts like Arial, Verdana, and Helvetica, and minimize the amount of text on each slide. When presenting charts or graphs, be sure to make the graphics as digestible as possible. In addition to showing the charts or graphs on a slide, take the time to explain them orally, as well. If your slides contain videos, make sure to caption them and describe the audio.

• Tips for designing a great presentation

Now that you have a foundation, here are a few quick tips that will help you design your next presentation with ease.

Start by brainstorming

Before you even open up your design tools, it’s a good idea to begin with a quick brainstorm. Even if you already know what you want to talk about, use your brainstorming session to figure out specifically what you want your audience to come away with. Do some freewriting, bounce ideas off of your collaborators, or use a brainstorming technique like mind mapping, brain writing, or random word picker .

Treat your presentation like an essay

Remember those five-paragraph essays you used to write in high school? There’s a reason that format is so enduringly popular. It’s a clear, intuitive way for your audience to absorb information. Think of your presentation as an essay, with an introduction, a thesis, three to five supporting points, and a conclusion. That way, you’ll get right to the point, present your evidence, and wrap up efficiently.

Get creative with the visuals

Part of our goal when we design a presentation is to keep our audience engaged. Don’t be afraid to dress up your presentation with fun photos, icons, charts, and other visuals. Make sure your slides are easy to read but remember to have fun with it too!

Share your slide deck with collaborators for feedback

Just as you would with any project, gather feedback on your slide deck before delivering your presentation. Ask your teammates whether it’s clear, engaging, and easy to follow.

Practice your presentation in front of an audience

There’s no substitute for practice. To build your confidence and work out any snags in your presentation, be sure to do a practice run in front of an audience at least once before the real thing.

• Best presentation layout designs

Here are a few presentation layout designs to get your creativity flowing. Don’t be afraid to customize them to your own needs. Be sure to check out Miro’s free presentation template, or browse our library of presentations created by the Miroverse community .

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Presentation Principles: Foundations of Effective Presentations

by SBRobinson | Presentations

There are multiple pathways to great presentations.

S ome presenters are fortunate enough to be naturally possessed of  stage presence, charisma, or a je ne sais quois that keeps their audience hanging on their every word. Amelia Earhart, Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King, Jr. … The rest of us, though, are just not there. We’re presenting to the board, our colleagues, university students, fellow conference-goers, or some other audience who may or may not know us or be familiar with our work. “Star quality” is not something we can rely on for a successful presentation.

What is an everyday presenter to do?

Leverage the power of  principles . You can find hundreds of books, articles, websites, and even courses on effective presentations with any number of strategies, recipes, steps, tips, tricks, hacks, or rules devoted to helping you design and deliver effective presentations. How do you choose what’s right for you? Rely on your principles .

Why principles?

There are certainly any number of definitions for the word “principles,” but I’m framing them here as the synthesis of fundamental rules and values that guide our decisions and actions. As such, principles are descriptive , rather than prescriptive . Principles can be shared in common with others, but in practice, may look quite different from presenter to presenter when applied. You and I could each be guided by the principle that audience engagement is necessary for effective presentations, but we will likely go about applying this principle in very different ways.

Under principles we can certainly suggest strategies, models, formulas, or step-by-step plans for adhering to them, but these do not need to be applied assiduously in a “take as directed” sort of way. The broad principles we choose guide our work and our decisions about how to use suggested strategies.

What principles might guide presentation work?

The American Evaluation Association’s Potent Presentations (p2i) Initiative  rests on the principle that the way in which you structure your message, design your presentation, and deliver it are key elements to success.

Here are others from presentation experts:

Every presentation worth doing has just one purpose: To make a change happen . – Seth Godin

Great content is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.   – Garr Reynolds

Make it Understandable; Make it Logical; Make it Real…to be more persuasive. – Andrew Dlugan

Conceptualizing and framing what you want to say is the most vital part of preparation. – Chris Anderson

What key presentation principle guides my work?

I’m a career educator who has taught everything from algebra to piano lessons, and my number one guiding principle is this: All presentations are lessons and all presenters are teachers. This principle guides my thinking as I develop presentations with participants’ needs in mind: what do they need to know, understand, or be able to do as a result of attending my presentation?

Look for upcoming blog posts on presentation principles, along with ideas, strategies, and steps you can apply in your own ways as you are guided by your presentation principles.

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Open Access

Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Public Health Genomics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America

• Kristen M. Naegle

Published: December 2, 2021

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554
• Reader Comments

Citation: Naegle KM (2021) Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides. PLoS Comput Biol 17(12): e1009554. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554

Copyright: © 2021 Kristen M. Naegle. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The author received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The author has declared no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The “presentation slide” is the building block of all academic presentations, whether they are journal clubs, thesis committee meetings, short conference talks, or hour-long seminars. A slide is a single page projected on a screen, usually built on the premise of a title, body, and figures or tables and includes both what is shown and what is spoken about that slide. Multiple slides are strung together to tell the larger story of the presentation. While there have been excellent 10 simple rules on giving entire presentations [ 1 , 2 ], there was an absence in the fine details of how to design a slide for optimal effect—such as the design elements that allow slides to convey meaningful information, to keep the audience engaged and informed, and to deliver the information intended and in the time frame allowed. As all research presentations seek to teach, effective slide design borrows from the same principles as effective teaching, including the consideration of cognitive processing your audience is relying on to organize, process, and retain information. This is written for anyone who needs to prepare slides from any length scale and for most purposes of conveying research to broad audiences. The rules are broken into 3 primary areas. Rules 1 to 5 are about optimizing the scope of each slide. Rules 6 to 8 are about principles around designing elements of the slide. Rules 9 to 10 are about preparing for your presentation, with the slides as the central focus of that preparation.

Rule 1: Include only one idea per slide

Each slide should have one central objective to deliver—the main idea or question [ 3 – 5 ]. Often, this means breaking complex ideas down into manageable pieces (see Fig 1 , where “background” information has been split into 2 key concepts). In another example, if you are presenting a complex computational approach in a large flow diagram, introduce it in smaller units, building it up until you finish with the entire diagram. The progressive buildup of complex information means that audiences are prepared to understand the whole picture, once you have dedicated time to each of the parts. You can accomplish the buildup of components in several ways—for example, using presentation software to cover/uncover information. Personally, I choose to create separate slides for each piece of information content I introduce—where the final slide has the entire diagram, and I use cropping or a cover on duplicated slides that come before to hide what I’m not yet ready to include. I use this method in order to ensure that each slide in my deck truly presents one specific idea (the new content) and the amount of the new information on that slide can be described in 1 minute (Rule 2), but it comes with the trade-off—a change to the format of one of the slides in the series often means changes to all slides.

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

Top left: A background slide that describes the background material on a project from my lab. The slide was created using a PowerPoint Design Template, which had to be modified to increase default text sizes for this figure (i.e., the default text sizes are even worse than shown here). Bottom row: The 2 new slides that break up the content into 2 explicit ideas about the background, using a central graphic. In the first slide, the graphic is an explicit example of the SH2 domain of PI3-kinase interacting with a phosphorylation site (Y754) on the PDGFR to describe the important details of what an SH2 domain and phosphotyrosine ligand are and how they interact. I use that same graphic in the second slide to generalize all binding events and include redundant text to drive home the central message (a lot of possible interactions might occur in the human proteome, more than we can currently measure). Top right highlights which rules were used to move from the original slide to the new slide. Specific changes as highlighted by Rule 7 include increasing contrast by changing the background color, increasing font size, changing to sans serif fonts, and removing all capital text and underlining (using bold to draw attention). PDGFR, platelet-derived growth factor receptor.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554.g001

Rule 2: Spend only 1 minute per slide

When you present your slide in the talk, it should take 1 minute or less to discuss. This rule is really helpful for planning purposes—a 20-minute presentation should have somewhere around 20 slides. Also, frequently giving your audience new information to feast on helps keep them engaged. During practice, if you find yourself spending more than a minute on a slide, there’s too much for that one slide—it’s time to break up the content into multiple slides or even remove information that is not wholly central to the story you are trying to tell. Reduce, reduce, reduce, until you get to a single message, clearly described, which takes less than 1 minute to present.

Rule 3: Make use of your heading

When each slide conveys only one message, use the heading of that slide to write exactly the message you are trying to deliver. Instead of titling the slide “Results,” try “CTNND1 is central to metastasis” or “False-positive rates are highly sample specific.” Use this landmark signpost to ensure that all the content on that slide is related exactly to the heading and only the heading. Think of the slide heading as the introductory or concluding sentence of a paragraph and the slide content the rest of the paragraph that supports the main point of the paragraph. An audience member should be able to follow along with you in the “paragraph” and come to the same conclusion sentence as your header at the end of the slide.

Rule 4: Include only essential points

While you are speaking, audience members’ eyes and minds will be wandering over your slide. If you have a comment, detail, or figure on a slide, have a plan to explicitly identify and talk about it. If you don’t think it’s important enough to spend time on, then don’t have it on your slide. This is especially important when faculty are present. I often tell students that thesis committee members are like cats: If you put a shiny bauble in front of them, they’ll go after it. Be sure to only put the shiny baubles on slides that you want them to focus on. Putting together a thesis meeting for only faculty is really an exercise in herding cats (if you have cats, you know this is no easy feat). Clear and concise slide design will go a long way in helping you corral those easily distracted faculty members.

Rule 5: Give credit, where credit is due

An exception to Rule 4 is to include proper citations or references to work on your slide. When adding citations, names of other researchers, or other types of credit, use a consistent style and method for adding this information to your slides. Your audience will then be able to easily partition this information from the other content. A common mistake people make is to think “I’ll add that reference later,” but I highly recommend you put the proper reference on the slide at the time you make it, before you forget where it came from. Finally, in certain kinds of presentations, credits can make it clear who did the work. For the faculty members heading labs, it is an effective way to connect your audience with the personnel in the lab who did the work, which is a great career booster for that person. For graduate students, it is an effective way to delineate your contribution to the work, especially in meetings where the goal is to establish your credentials for meeting the rigors of a PhD checkpoint.

Rule 6: Use graphics effectively

As a rule, you should almost never have slides that only contain text. Build your slides around good visualizations. It is a visual presentation after all, and as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. However, on the flip side, don’t muddy the point of the slide by putting too many complex graphics on a single slide. A multipanel figure that you might include in a manuscript should often be broken into 1 panel per slide (see Rule 1 ). One way to ensure that you use the graphics effectively is to make a point to introduce the figure and its elements to the audience verbally, especially for data figures. For example, you might say the following: “This graph here shows the measured false-positive rate for an experiment and each point is a replicate of the experiment, the graph demonstrates …” If you have put too much on one slide to present in 1 minute (see Rule 2 ), then the complexity or number of the visualizations is too much for just one slide.

Rule 7: Design to avoid cognitive overload

The type of slide elements, the number of them, and how you present them all impact the ability for the audience to intake, organize, and remember the content. For example, a frequent mistake in slide design is to include full sentences, but reading and verbal processing use the same cognitive channels—therefore, an audience member can either read the slide, listen to you, or do some part of both (each poorly), as a result of cognitive overload [ 4 ]. The visual channel is separate, allowing images/videos to be processed with auditory information without cognitive overload [ 6 ] (Rule 6). As presentations are an exercise in listening, and not reading, do what you can to optimize the ability of the audience to listen. Use words sparingly as “guide posts” to you and the audience about major points of the slide. In fact, you can add short text fragments, redundant with the verbal component of the presentation, which has been shown to improve retention [ 7 ] (see Fig 1 for an example of redundant text that avoids cognitive overload). Be careful in the selection of a slide template to minimize accidentally adding elements that the audience must process, but are unimportant. David JP Phillips argues (and effectively demonstrates in his TEDx talk [ 5 ]) that the human brain can easily interpret 6 elements and more than that requires a 500% increase in human cognition load—so keep the total number of elements on the slide to 6 or less. Finally, in addition to the use of short text, white space, and the effective use of graphics/images, you can improve ease of cognitive processing further by considering color choices and font type and size. Here are a few suggestions for improving the experience for your audience, highlighting the importance of these elements for some specific groups:

• Use high contrast colors and simple backgrounds with low to no color—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment.
• Use sans serif fonts and large font sizes (including figure legends), avoid italics, underlining (use bold font instead for emphasis), and all capital letters—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment [ 8 ].
• Use color combinations and palettes that can be understood by those with different forms of color blindness [ 9 ]. There are excellent tools available to identify colors to use and ways to simulate your presentation or figures as they might be seen by a person with color blindness (easily found by a web search).
• In this increasing world of virtual presentation tools, consider practicing your talk with a closed captioning system capture your words. Use this to identify how to improve your speaking pace, volume, and annunciation to improve understanding by all members of your audience, but especially those with a hearing impairment.

Rule 8: Design the slide so that a distracted person gets the main takeaway

It is very difficult to stay focused on a presentation, especially if it is long or if it is part of a longer series of talks at a conference. Audience members may get distracted by an important email, or they may start dreaming of lunch. So, it’s important to look at your slide and ask “If they heard nothing I said, will they understand the key concept of this slide?” The other rules are set up to help with this, including clarity of the single point of the slide (Rule 1), titling it with a major conclusion (Rule 3), and the use of figures (Rule 6) and short text redundant to your verbal description (Rule 7). However, with each slide, step back and ask whether its main conclusion is conveyed, even if someone didn’t hear your accompanying dialog. Importantly, ask if the information on the slide is at the right level of abstraction. For example, do you have too many details about the experiment, which hides the conclusion of the experiment (i.e., breaking Rule 1)? If you are worried about not having enough details, keep a slide at the end of your slide deck (after your conclusions and acknowledgments) with the more detailed information that you can refer to during a question and answer period.

Rule 9: Iteratively improve slide design through practice

Well-designed slides that follow the first 8 rules are intended to help you deliver the message you intend and in the amount of time you intend to deliver it in. The best way to ensure that you nailed slide design for your presentation is to practice, typically a lot. The most important aspects of practicing a new presentation, with an eye toward slide design, are the following 2 key points: (1) practice to ensure that you hit, each time through, the most important points (for example, the text guide posts you left yourself and the title of the slide); and (2) practice to ensure that as you conclude the end of one slide, it leads directly to the next slide. Slide transitions, what you say as you end one slide and begin the next, are important to keeping the flow of the “story.” Practice is when I discover that the order of my presentation is poor or that I left myself too few guideposts to remember what was coming next. Additionally, during practice, the most frequent things I have to improve relate to Rule 2 (the slide takes too long to present, usually because I broke Rule 1, and I’m delivering too much information for one slide), Rule 4 (I have a nonessential detail on the slide), and Rule 5 (I forgot to give a key reference). The very best type of practice is in front of an audience (for example, your lab or peers), where, with fresh perspectives, they can help you identify places for improving slide content, design, and connections across the entirety of your talk.

Rule 10: Design to mitigate the impact of technical disasters

The real presentation almost never goes as we planned in our heads or during our practice. Maybe the speaker before you went over time and now you need to adjust. Maybe the computer the organizer is having you use won’t show your video. Maybe your internet is poor on the day you are giving a virtual presentation at a conference. Technical problems are routinely part of the practice of sharing your work through presentations. Hence, you can design your slides to limit the impact certain kinds of technical disasters create and also prepare alternate approaches. Here are just a few examples of the preparation you can do that will take you a long way toward avoiding a complete fiasco:

• Save your presentation as a PDF—if the version of Keynote or PowerPoint on a host computer cause issues, you still have a functional copy that has a higher guarantee of compatibility.
• In using videos, create a backup slide with screen shots of key results. For example, if I have a video of cell migration, I’ll be sure to have a copy of the start and end of the video, in case the video doesn’t play. Even if the video worked, you can pause on this backup slide and take the time to highlight the key results in words if someone could not see or understand the video.
• Avoid animations, such as figures or text that flash/fly-in/etc. Surveys suggest that no one likes movement in presentations [ 3 , 4 ]. There is likely a cognitive underpinning to the almost universal distaste of pointless animations that relates to the idea proposed by Kosslyn and colleagues that animations are salient perceptual units that captures direct attention [ 4 ]. Although perceptual salience can be used to draw attention to and improve retention of specific points, if you use this approach for unnecessary/unimportant things (like animation of your bullet point text, fly-ins of figures, etc.), then you will distract your audience from the important content. Finally, animations cause additional processing burdens for people with visual impairments [ 10 ] and create opportunities for technical disasters if the software on the host system is not compatible with your planned animation.

Conclusions

These rules are just a start in creating more engaging presentations that increase audience retention of your material. However, there are wonderful resources on continuing on the journey of becoming an amazing public speaker, which includes understanding the psychology and neuroscience behind human perception and learning. For example, as highlighted in Rule 7, David JP Phillips has a wonderful TEDx talk on the subject [ 5 ], and “PowerPoint presentation flaws and failures: A psychological analysis,” by Kosslyn and colleagues is deeply detailed about a number of aspects of human cognition and presentation style [ 4 ]. There are many books on the topic, including the popular “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds [ 11 ]. Finally, although briefly touched on here, the visualization of data is an entire topic of its own that is worth perfecting for both written and oral presentations of work, with fantastic resources like Edward Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” [ 12 ] or the article “Visualization of Biomedical Data” by O’Donoghue and colleagues [ 13 ].

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the countless presenters, colleagues, students, and mentors from which I have learned a great deal from on effective presentations. Also, a thank you to the wonderful resources published by organizations on how to increase inclusivity. A special thanks to Dr. Jason Papin and Dr. Michael Guertin on early feedback of this editorial.

• View Article
• PubMed/NCBI
• Google Scholar
• 3. Teaching VUC for Making Better PowerPoint Presentations. n.d. Available from: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/making-better-powerpoint-presentations/#baddeley .
• 8. Creating a dyslexia friendly workplace. Dyslexia friendly style guide. nd. Available from: https://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/advice/employers/creating-a-dyslexia-friendly-workplace/dyslexia-friendly-style-guide .
• 9. Cravit R. How to Use Color Blind Friendly Palettes to Make Your Charts Accessible. 2019. Available from: https://venngage.com/blog/color-blind-friendly-palette/ .
• 10. Making your conference presentation more accessible to blind and partially sighted people. n.d. Available from: https://vocaleyes.co.uk/services/resources/guidelines-for-making-your-conference-presentation-more-accessible-to-blind-and-partially-sighted-people/ .
• 11. Reynolds G. Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. 2nd ed. New Riders Pub; 2011.
• 12. Tufte ER. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. 2nd ed. Graphics Press; 2001.

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• Presentation Workshop Slides: Visual Design for Oral & Poster Presentations For more in-depth presentation tips and examples, download the slides from the Library's presentation design workshop
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• SlideShare Upload slides, posters, and other documents for a public or private audience. Formats accepted include PowerPoint, PDF, and OpenDocument.
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• Google Drive Google Drive, a free cloud storage service connected to Google accounts, is a great way to host and share research presentation materials with a limited audience.

Spring 2024 Presentation Prep Workshop Series

The UNM Libraries are teaming up with Graduate Support and the Engineering Student Success Center to offer a four-part presentation prep workshop series this semester. Join us to learn how to be a more prepared, confident, and effective presenter! Workshops take place on Tuesdays from 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm in a hybrid format (Zoom & in person in Centennial Science & Engineering Library). Registration is strongly recommended, & workshops are open to anyone in the UNM community! Pizza will be provided to in-person attendees.

• What is a Conference : Tuesday, February 27, 12:30-1:30pm (Zoom & CSEL DEN 2)
• Designing & Developing Presentations : Tuesday, March 5, 12:30-1:30pm (Zoom & CSEL DEN 2)
• Data Visualization : Tuesday, March 19, 12:30-1:30pm (Zoom & CSEL DEN 2)
• Delivering Presentations : Tuesday, March 26, 12:30-1:30pm (Zoom & CSEL DEN 2)

General Presentation Principles

• Think and communicate visually : Humans remember images and words better than words alone.
• Be consistent : Keep your slides or poster design simple and use a consistent style (fonts, colors)
• Focus : Keep your audience focused on your most important points
• Hook and Preview
• Methods, Data and/or Details (Don't dwell overlong here)
• Conclusion and Takeaways

Other Considerations

• Use stories to help people remember your points
• Use metaphorical thinking to choose impactful and meaningful images
• Avoid "slide-uments" (slides that contain a high level of text detail). To communicate detail, make a  slideshow as well as a handout /document

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• Next: Design: Slides >>
• Last Updated: Mar 19, 2024 10:56 AM
• URL: https://libguides.unm.edu/presentations

Presentation design principles for better PowerPoint design

• Written by: Richard Goring
• Categories: PowerPoint design , PowerPoint productivity
• Comments: 17

I’m often asked how to make presentations more effervescent. How they can have more fizz. Or, worst of all, “Can you make my presentation pop?” Well, the answer is yes. By applying some key principles of presentation design , you can make your PowerPoint design really standout and deliver both a more ‘popping’ – but also more effective – presentation.

I’ve split this out into a couple of topics, across two broad categories. One is presentation design, which is really the core graphic design principles that work across any form of visual communication. The other I’ve classed as PowerPoint design, which is a little more specific to using PowerPoint as a tool to create or deliver content. All the ideas have practical applications in PowerPoint, but I thought this breakdown was potentially useful.

Presentation design with images

What if I told you that your presentations could look like these examples?

They’re all using images to enhance your PowerPoint design, both by looking good, but also contributing to the story and helping your audience understand your messages. We’ll get more into the visual storytelling aspect of this later, so for now, just think about the quality of your images. All of these come from one of my favourite free stock photo sites, Unsplash , which gives you royalty free images for commercial use, and they’re all beautiful.

So, it’s not just a case of dropping nice images on the slide. You need to understand how to lay them out well, and use the crop, colour, and artistic effects tools in PowerPoint to treat the images appropriately, and give your presentation a professional look.

To see how we’ve created these kinds of slides, check out the image crop , and crop to zoom and full bleed step-by-step guides. Simple, but considered use of the crop tool can work wonders with your PowerPoint presentation design.

Presentation design incorporating white space

Big, bold, flood fill images are great, and an easy way to make your slides stand out. But it’s not all about pictures and Presentation Zen;  inevitably you’ll need to place other content onto your slides, whether that’s facts, figures, charts, or even dare I say it… bullet points. This is where the use of white space in presentation design becomes crucial.

White space is not about purely adding ‘white space’ onto your slide. This one has plenty of it, but it still looks terrible:

It’s about creating areas of contrast, with clear focal points to draw your attention to the important parts, and even create a flow and hierarchy across your slide.

This example gives you that luxurious feel of the full bleed image, but crops it so that the focal point – the watch – is off to one side, leaving plenty of white, or ‘negative’ space around the arm for your content. The two sections work nicely together, and we’ve anchored the text in a content placeholder and given it some structure too, by actually reducing the size of the text to give it more room. Again, we’ve got a full tutorial on how to incorporate white space like this here .

Presentation design using grids

Grids are pretty much design 101, and to be honest, I’m surprised that we’ve got this far into presentation design without me having brought them up. You’ll likely be familiar with grids from magazines and newspapers – these mainly use column grids. The page is divided into columns and then content is designed to sit across these columns in any combination, which balances the content.

Well, the same thing applies to PowerPoint presentation design: a grid system helps to lay out your content in clear, easy to follow areas.

You can use a grid to create distinct sections, such as telling the start, middle, and end of a story. It’s much easier for your audience to follow, as everything is better organized.

And, it helps bring text into line – if you have any – which is important as it minimizes distractions for your audience when trying to read.

Using a grid also helps you decide where to position content, as there are only so many places that you can put things. Here, for example, one third of the slide has been taken up with the supporting image, so we’ve created a grid within a grid to lay out the three pie charts, which helps to create a feeling of harmony and sophistication:

And don’t think that your divisions have to be straight along the gridlines. Here’s an example that doesn’t apply the rule exactly, but still works really well.

Also, by using a grid, you achieve a consistent feel across all your slides for overall presentation design cohesion.

What does all of that mean? Well, you can transform a slide like this:

It’s really quick and easy to do in PowerPoint too, and you can see our tutorial on using grids and the guide tools in PowerPoint to bring your presentation design up a level.

Presentation design with colour themes

Another key presentation design principle is colour. Setting the right colour palette is essential, as it gives everything a consistent feel, allows you to adhere to your brand, and can give you the ability to assign meaning to specific colours to help your audience understand things. The best way to handle colours in PowerPoint is to set your template correctly and use a colour theme. You can find out how to  change your PowerPoint colour theme here . It’s really quick and easy to do. Once you’ve done it, the theme will save with the file (or template), so you don’t need to worry about it again.

Once set, you can use colour in interesting ways to convey meaning.

For example, a heat map is a great way to show data ranges, like metrics, using a scale, rather than just plain numbers. That’s more helpful to your audience, as it allows them to immediately see both the absolute and relative values, rather than having to spend time deciphering it.

You can also use colour to focus attention.

In complex data sets, using contrast colours can help to highlight primary datasets. Here, for instance, you can clearly see the main data series, compared to the ‘everything else’ data series.

Again, once you’ve set your colour theme, using these techniques as part of your presentation design is pretty easy, and you can find more specific guidance on how to manipulate colours in PowerPoint here .

PowerPoint design with text formatting

With your grids, colours, and white space considered from a high-level presentation design perspective, you now get into the specifics of creating slides in PowerPoint. As much as you, I, and your audiences, love presentations that make use of effective visuals, we know there are always going to be slides that are stuffed to the gills with boring text and even boring-er bullet points.

But, by applying the presentation design techniques already mentioned, you can fairly easily transform your text-heavy slide into something that’s far easier on the eye:

By using grids, appropriate colour, and white space, your PowerPoint slide design could look like this. Breaking out the text with decent paragraph spacing helps your audience parse the content more efficiently. Everything is easier to follow with consistent fonts and the use of colour highlighting. And the white space around the content actually gives the slide greater impact – particularly the use of the large margins around the text, created by the contrasting placeholder. There are a great many more options, and for ten in-depth typography techniques, check out this post . But if you’re just looking for nice fonts to use, this rundown of ten of our favourite fonts for presentations is a must-read.

As you’ve probably come to expect by now, this is something you can do using only PowerPoint, and you can see how in this tutorial on text formatting .

PowerPoint design to manipulate images

While it’s not Photoshop, PowerPoint has some neat tools to manipulate images.

What if I were to tell you the picture you see here had been constructed out of this…

PowerPoint design tools for images are all found on the Format tab on the ribbon. There are plenty of options to choose from, but only some actually enhance your design. For PowerPoint design tools, you should really focus on the left-hand side of the ribbon. The good features include the Remove Background tool, which does what its name suggests. The Color section allows you to put a colour wash over everything, but also, at the bottom of the menu, you can choose Set Transparent Color, which will remove a single colour from any image, which is how I’ve cut out the phone image in this example. Artistic Effects are generally terrible, except blur (which is great for changing focus on an image) and the Transparency tool – newly available in Office 365 – which makes pictures transparent. For a full tutorial on making the above example image, watch this short video .

PowerPoint design with visual storytelling

And finally, my favourite thing is to use these design techniques as part of visual storytelling, which helps dramatically improve your presentation.

Think about how you can use an image to convey meaning, as well as provide aesthetic appeal. For instance, you could use a skyscraper being constructed to show elements that are taking you higher, with labels up the building showing the key metrics:

Or use a common sight from underground stations – the advertising boards on escalators – to show a data series increasing. The image also gives the figures room to breathe:

It doesn’t need to be complicated, and this example has been constructed from an image, some text, and an arrow, to show the 20% of business highlighted on the office photograph:

And of course, we have a short video tutorial to show you exactly how to do it. Sometimes, just finding the right image can be a real help coming up with the right PowerPoint design ideas, but you may also want to look to other design resources for inspiration .

The main thing to remember about effective presentation design is that you probably don’t have the time to create a totally new concept each time, or a mood board for your work. These ideas, especially the PowerPoint design ideas, are all about helping you create beautiful and effective presentations quickly, with minimal effort. A solid basis in design principles – coupled with a few PowerPoint tricks -will set you on your way. So, hopefully next time someone asks you to make a presentation ‘pop’ you can uncork the champagne and tell them you already have.

Richard Goring

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LOVE LOVE this . .. so helpful and fun to work with. .

Your design concepts and tips were highly recommended by BiancaWoods.weebly.com and after downloading a template and reading your articles – now I see why.

Impressive resources!

Brilliant, thanks so much! Bianca is pretty awesome too. Glad that we’re all able to share with the community.

Nice way of explaining the information

Richard I have been following you since I met you at an ATD regional conference. You have always responded generously with the best in class PowerPoint tutorials and aids. Thank you for your excellence.

You’re most welcome, thanks so much!

Really useful and inspiring presentation.

It’s helped me see how to go beyond the mechanics of what PowerPoint can do towards creating a compelling and coherent design and story

This was really engaging, beautiful and extremely useful. Looking forward to using ideas into my slides.

The way you showed the Before and After is fantastic.

Very useful read .short video of 7 minutes on presentation is great to improve our presentation skills

Very creative and inspiring! You continue to amaze me with the quality of your desin6!

Really nice ideas – solid information. Thanks.

Amazing tutorials. Thank you for so generously sharing your skills, tips, and creativity!!

very interesting topic and very well presentation,thanks for this blog

very interesting topic

Excellent session as usual.

Thank you Richard for your amazing presentation! Very helpful.

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Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides

Kristen m. naegle.

Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Public Health Genomics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America

Introduction

The “presentation slide” is the building block of all academic presentations, whether they are journal clubs, thesis committee meetings, short conference talks, or hour-long seminars. A slide is a single page projected on a screen, usually built on the premise of a title, body, and figures or tables and includes both what is shown and what is spoken about that slide. Multiple slides are strung together to tell the larger story of the presentation. While there have been excellent 10 simple rules on giving entire presentations [ 1 , 2 ], there was an absence in the fine details of how to design a slide for optimal effect—such as the design elements that allow slides to convey meaningful information, to keep the audience engaged and informed, and to deliver the information intended and in the time frame allowed. As all research presentations seek to teach, effective slide design borrows from the same principles as effective teaching, including the consideration of cognitive processing your audience is relying on to organize, process, and retain information. This is written for anyone who needs to prepare slides from any length scale and for most purposes of conveying research to broad audiences. The rules are broken into 3 primary areas. Rules 1 to 5 are about optimizing the scope of each slide. Rules 6 to 8 are about principles around designing elements of the slide. Rules 9 to 10 are about preparing for your presentation, with the slides as the central focus of that preparation.

Rule 1: Include only one idea per slide

Each slide should have one central objective to deliver—the main idea or question [ 3 – 5 ]. Often, this means breaking complex ideas down into manageable pieces (see Fig 1 , where “background” information has been split into 2 key concepts). In another example, if you are presenting a complex computational approach in a large flow diagram, introduce it in smaller units, building it up until you finish with the entire diagram. The progressive buildup of complex information means that audiences are prepared to understand the whole picture, once you have dedicated time to each of the parts. You can accomplish the buildup of components in several ways—for example, using presentation software to cover/uncover information. Personally, I choose to create separate slides for each piece of information content I introduce—where the final slide has the entire diagram, and I use cropping or a cover on duplicated slides that come before to hide what I’m not yet ready to include. I use this method in order to ensure that each slide in my deck truly presents one specific idea (the new content) and the amount of the new information on that slide can be described in 1 minute (Rule 2), but it comes with the trade-off—a change to the format of one of the slides in the series often means changes to all slides.

Top left: A background slide that describes the background material on a project from my lab. The slide was created using a PowerPoint Design Template, which had to be modified to increase default text sizes for this figure (i.e., the default text sizes are even worse than shown here). Bottom row: The 2 new slides that break up the content into 2 explicit ideas about the background, using a central graphic. In the first slide, the graphic is an explicit example of the SH2 domain of PI3-kinase interacting with a phosphorylation site (Y754) on the PDGFR to describe the important details of what an SH2 domain and phosphotyrosine ligand are and how they interact. I use that same graphic in the second slide to generalize all binding events and include redundant text to drive home the central message (a lot of possible interactions might occur in the human proteome, more than we can currently measure). Top right highlights which rules were used to move from the original slide to the new slide. Specific changes as highlighted by Rule 7 include increasing contrast by changing the background color, increasing font size, changing to sans serif fonts, and removing all capital text and underlining (using bold to draw attention). PDGFR, platelet-derived growth factor receptor.

Rule 2: Spend only 1 minute per slide

When you present your slide in the talk, it should take 1 minute or less to discuss. This rule is really helpful for planning purposes—a 20-minute presentation should have somewhere around 20 slides. Also, frequently giving your audience new information to feast on helps keep them engaged. During practice, if you find yourself spending more than a minute on a slide, there’s too much for that one slide—it’s time to break up the content into multiple slides or even remove information that is not wholly central to the story you are trying to tell. Reduce, reduce, reduce, until you get to a single message, clearly described, which takes less than 1 minute to present.

Rule 3: Make use of your heading

When each slide conveys only one message, use the heading of that slide to write exactly the message you are trying to deliver. Instead of titling the slide “Results,” try “CTNND1 is central to metastasis” or “False-positive rates are highly sample specific.” Use this landmark signpost to ensure that all the content on that slide is related exactly to the heading and only the heading. Think of the slide heading as the introductory or concluding sentence of a paragraph and the slide content the rest of the paragraph that supports the main point of the paragraph. An audience member should be able to follow along with you in the “paragraph” and come to the same conclusion sentence as your header at the end of the slide.

Rule 4: Include only essential points

While you are speaking, audience members’ eyes and minds will be wandering over your slide. If you have a comment, detail, or figure on a slide, have a plan to explicitly identify and talk about it. If you don’t think it’s important enough to spend time on, then don’t have it on your slide. This is especially important when faculty are present. I often tell students that thesis committee members are like cats: If you put a shiny bauble in front of them, they’ll go after it. Be sure to only put the shiny baubles on slides that you want them to focus on. Putting together a thesis meeting for only faculty is really an exercise in herding cats (if you have cats, you know this is no easy feat). Clear and concise slide design will go a long way in helping you corral those easily distracted faculty members.

Rule 5: Give credit, where credit is due

An exception to Rule 4 is to include proper citations or references to work on your slide. When adding citations, names of other researchers, or other types of credit, use a consistent style and method for adding this information to your slides. Your audience will then be able to easily partition this information from the other content. A common mistake people make is to think “I’ll add that reference later,” but I highly recommend you put the proper reference on the slide at the time you make it, before you forget where it came from. Finally, in certain kinds of presentations, credits can make it clear who did the work. For the faculty members heading labs, it is an effective way to connect your audience with the personnel in the lab who did the work, which is a great career booster for that person. For graduate students, it is an effective way to delineate your contribution to the work, especially in meetings where the goal is to establish your credentials for meeting the rigors of a PhD checkpoint.

Rule 6: Use graphics effectively

As a rule, you should almost never have slides that only contain text. Build your slides around good visualizations. It is a visual presentation after all, and as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. However, on the flip side, don’t muddy the point of the slide by putting too many complex graphics on a single slide. A multipanel figure that you might include in a manuscript should often be broken into 1 panel per slide (see Rule 1 ). One way to ensure that you use the graphics effectively is to make a point to introduce the figure and its elements to the audience verbally, especially for data figures. For example, you might say the following: “This graph here shows the measured false-positive rate for an experiment and each point is a replicate of the experiment, the graph demonstrates …” If you have put too much on one slide to present in 1 minute (see Rule 2 ), then the complexity or number of the visualizations is too much for just one slide.

Rule 7: Design to avoid cognitive overload

The type of slide elements, the number of them, and how you present them all impact the ability for the audience to intake, organize, and remember the content. For example, a frequent mistake in slide design is to include full sentences, but reading and verbal processing use the same cognitive channels—therefore, an audience member can either read the slide, listen to you, or do some part of both (each poorly), as a result of cognitive overload [ 4 ]. The visual channel is separate, allowing images/videos to be processed with auditory information without cognitive overload [ 6 ] (Rule 6). As presentations are an exercise in listening, and not reading, do what you can to optimize the ability of the audience to listen. Use words sparingly as “guide posts” to you and the audience about major points of the slide. In fact, you can add short text fragments, redundant with the verbal component of the presentation, which has been shown to improve retention [ 7 ] (see Fig 1 for an example of redundant text that avoids cognitive overload). Be careful in the selection of a slide template to minimize accidentally adding elements that the audience must process, but are unimportant. David JP Phillips argues (and effectively demonstrates in his TEDx talk [ 5 ]) that the human brain can easily interpret 6 elements and more than that requires a 500% increase in human cognition load—so keep the total number of elements on the slide to 6 or less. Finally, in addition to the use of short text, white space, and the effective use of graphics/images, you can improve ease of cognitive processing further by considering color choices and font type and size. Here are a few suggestions for improving the experience for your audience, highlighting the importance of these elements for some specific groups:

• Use high contrast colors and simple backgrounds with low to no color—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment.
• Use sans serif fonts and large font sizes (including figure legends), avoid italics, underlining (use bold font instead for emphasis), and all capital letters—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment [ 8 ].
• Use color combinations and palettes that can be understood by those with different forms of color blindness [ 9 ]. There are excellent tools available to identify colors to use and ways to simulate your presentation or figures as they might be seen by a person with color blindness (easily found by a web search).
• In this increasing world of virtual presentation tools, consider practicing your talk with a closed captioning system capture your words. Use this to identify how to improve your speaking pace, volume, and annunciation to improve understanding by all members of your audience, but especially those with a hearing impairment.

Rule 8: Design the slide so that a distracted person gets the main takeaway

It is very difficult to stay focused on a presentation, especially if it is long or if it is part of a longer series of talks at a conference. Audience members may get distracted by an important email, or they may start dreaming of lunch. So, it’s important to look at your slide and ask “If they heard nothing I said, will they understand the key concept of this slide?” The other rules are set up to help with this, including clarity of the single point of the slide (Rule 1), titling it with a major conclusion (Rule 3), and the use of figures (Rule 6) and short text redundant to your verbal description (Rule 7). However, with each slide, step back and ask whether its main conclusion is conveyed, even if someone didn’t hear your accompanying dialog. Importantly, ask if the information on the slide is at the right level of abstraction. For example, do you have too many details about the experiment, which hides the conclusion of the experiment (i.e., breaking Rule 1)? If you are worried about not having enough details, keep a slide at the end of your slide deck (after your conclusions and acknowledgments) with the more detailed information that you can refer to during a question and answer period.

Rule 9: Iteratively improve slide design through practice

Well-designed slides that follow the first 8 rules are intended to help you deliver the message you intend and in the amount of time you intend to deliver it in. The best way to ensure that you nailed slide design for your presentation is to practice, typically a lot. The most important aspects of practicing a new presentation, with an eye toward slide design, are the following 2 key points: (1) practice to ensure that you hit, each time through, the most important points (for example, the text guide posts you left yourself and the title of the slide); and (2) practice to ensure that as you conclude the end of one slide, it leads directly to the next slide. Slide transitions, what you say as you end one slide and begin the next, are important to keeping the flow of the “story.” Practice is when I discover that the order of my presentation is poor or that I left myself too few guideposts to remember what was coming next. Additionally, during practice, the most frequent things I have to improve relate to Rule 2 (the slide takes too long to present, usually because I broke Rule 1, and I’m delivering too much information for one slide), Rule 4 (I have a nonessential detail on the slide), and Rule 5 (I forgot to give a key reference). The very best type of practice is in front of an audience (for example, your lab or peers), where, with fresh perspectives, they can help you identify places for improving slide content, design, and connections across the entirety of your talk.

Rule 10: Design to mitigate the impact of technical disasters

The real presentation almost never goes as we planned in our heads or during our practice. Maybe the speaker before you went over time and now you need to adjust. Maybe the computer the organizer is having you use won’t show your video. Maybe your internet is poor on the day you are giving a virtual presentation at a conference. Technical problems are routinely part of the practice of sharing your work through presentations. Hence, you can design your slides to limit the impact certain kinds of technical disasters create and also prepare alternate approaches. Here are just a few examples of the preparation you can do that will take you a long way toward avoiding a complete fiasco:

• Save your presentation as a PDF—if the version of Keynote or PowerPoint on a host computer cause issues, you still have a functional copy that has a higher guarantee of compatibility.
• In using videos, create a backup slide with screen shots of key results. For example, if I have a video of cell migration, I’ll be sure to have a copy of the start and end of the video, in case the video doesn’t play. Even if the video worked, you can pause on this backup slide and take the time to highlight the key results in words if someone could not see or understand the video.
• Avoid animations, such as figures or text that flash/fly-in/etc. Surveys suggest that no one likes movement in presentations [ 3 , 4 ]. There is likely a cognitive underpinning to the almost universal distaste of pointless animations that relates to the idea proposed by Kosslyn and colleagues that animations are salient perceptual units that captures direct attention [ 4 ]. Although perceptual salience can be used to draw attention to and improve retention of specific points, if you use this approach for unnecessary/unimportant things (like animation of your bullet point text, fly-ins of figures, etc.), then you will distract your audience from the important content. Finally, animations cause additional processing burdens for people with visual impairments [ 10 ] and create opportunities for technical disasters if the software on the host system is not compatible with your planned animation.

Conclusions

These rules are just a start in creating more engaging presentations that increase audience retention of your material. However, there are wonderful resources on continuing on the journey of becoming an amazing public speaker, which includes understanding the psychology and neuroscience behind human perception and learning. For example, as highlighted in Rule 7, David JP Phillips has a wonderful TEDx talk on the subject [ 5 ], and “PowerPoint presentation flaws and failures: A psychological analysis,” by Kosslyn and colleagues is deeply detailed about a number of aspects of human cognition and presentation style [ 4 ]. There are many books on the topic, including the popular “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds [ 11 ]. Finally, although briefly touched on here, the visualization of data is an entire topic of its own that is worth perfecting for both written and oral presentations of work, with fantastic resources like Edward Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” [ 12 ] or the article “Visualization of Biomedical Data” by O’Donoghue and colleagues [ 13 ].

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the countless presenters, colleagues, students, and mentors from which I have learned a great deal from on effective presentations. Also, a thank you to the wonderful resources published by organizations on how to increase inclusivity. A special thanks to Dr. Jason Papin and Dr. Michael Guertin on early feedback of this editorial.

Funding Statement

The author received no specific funding for this work.

Excellent Presentation Design

SlideRabbit is an elite presentation design agency, specializing in helping our clients create powerful presentations. We provide a wide variety of presentation services to clients of all sizes.

But the truth is, we hear more often than we’d like to, “Wow! I didn’t even know these services existed!”

This longer-than-usual article outlines all there is to know about presentation design, presentation services, and selecting the right presentation agency for your needs.

1. What is presentation design?

Presentation services in general encompass tip-to-tail presentation generation, from conception to delivery.

Presentation design is more than just graphic design. The term “presentation designer” if often used to describe all manner of professionals, from writers to speaking coaches to creative thinkers through designer and even event producers.

For the purposes of this article, we with use presentation design to refer to the actual work of design that fits into the presentation services suite of any true presentation design agency. But keep in mind that presentation services can begin even before you’ve written a word.

Anytime one presents, there are a few foundational goals:

• To look smart and in control
• To convince or inform your audience
• To keep your audience engaged

There may be additional goals by situation, but the three of these almost always apply. Whether presenting live or virtually, great presentation design will support you in these goals.

Good design means you’ll look great in front of your audience. Think of the quality of design we see every day. When you show up with undercooked slides, or heaven-forbid, clip-art, you are showing your hand as an amateur. Come with your best foot forward and invest in professional design.

Spending more time creating meaningful visual aids means coming to the table better prepared to inform or convince your audience. With well-made and intentionally designed visuals, your arguments will be clearer and more memorable to your audience.

Fighting distraction and paper-thin attention spans , an expertly built presentation can go a long way to keeping your audience glued to the screen. Not only can a presentation agency help you start with a bang , but they can help you keep the attention once you’ve gained it. Strong visuals and design tricks will make the difference.

2. Why is presentation design important?

So now that we know what presentation design is and a few of its benefits, why and how do professional presentation designers accomplish those goals?

Presentation designers are communication experts. We are well-versed it communication tactics that help your audience digest and process your information effectively.

General level of everyday design

Keep in mind that we are bombarded with professional design from every direction. Whether its digital billboards, social media ads, or websites we use regularly, the level of everyday design is high.

When a presenter is selling a product or even introducing a new idea, the design quality is an immediate cue to the audience on whether this is a professional and trustworthy presentation.

Stock templates and clip art no longer cut it. To rise above the noise and earn an audience’s trust, presenters must invest in better design to be believed.

Working memory

Did you know that in addition to short term memory and long term memory, there is something called working memory ?

The working memory is where we process now information, draw conclusions, and make associations. When it comes to presentation, its crucial to keep the limitations of the working memory in mind. Most agree that the working memory can only handle about 5 to 9 pieces of new information at once.

This means, that to avoid overwhelming your audience, simplifying your messaging and the information on your slides is vital to keeping your audience.

Presentation agencies are here to help you sculpt powerful and simple messages, and then illustrate them with clear and concise visuals.

Attention Span

According to recent study by Microsoft, we are down to only about 8 seconds of attention span in most adults.

With such a short time to make an impression, presenters need to rely on more than their presenting skills to keep their audience. A presentation agency can help.

By designing with distracted audiences in mind, presentation designers employ visual tricks (like movement, frequently changing backgrounds, et cetera) to keep the presentation feeling fast-paced and lively.

Ease of use going forward

Well-made slides stand the test of time. Not only will the aesthetic quality last longer, but well made graphics are easy to edit as needs change. Update content, change labels, adjust text – editable slides made natively in presentation software are an investment that keeps paying off.

3. Principles of good presentation design

How can you spot good presentation design? While design can be highly subjective there are still objective tenets of presentation design, many of which come from informational design principles.

Presentation professionals focus not only on design, but also on messaging and communication. During all stages of presentation production, professionals keep a keen eye on the complexity of information.

As mentioned above, the working memory is easily overloaded, so it’s important to continually evaluate and simplify.

Simplification can be accomplished through narrative, through concept-honing, and of course, through design.

White space

An experienced presentation designer will help find opportunities to create visual space. White space on slides creates resting room for the audience members’ eyes, which reduces visual overwhelm, and allows other content to stand out more affectively.

Data display

Correctly expressing data in a way that will be meaningful for those receiving it can be a huge challenge. Presentation professionals deal with expressing data regularly and can guide presenters to use the right graph types, simplify the message, and create impactful annotations and take aways.

Image Usage

No more images with murky copyright obligations or cheesy pictures from Google. Presentation agencies will source high-quality stock photography that is both salient and powerful. Moving images make a strong impression on audience members.

4. How to sculpt a presentation narrative

Besides design, presentation design agencies are here to help sculpt powerful narratives.

Don’t go it alone when preparing for an important pitch, or an upcoming chance to rally the troops. Consult the experts to create narratives that will work for your purposes, your audience, and your ultimate goals.

There are different appropriate approaches to different types of presentations. Here are just a few.

Sales or investment pitches

The classic mistake we see in pitch presentations is an error in focus. So many start with a boring intro about themselves and slowly get to their offerings. Change your focus !

Capture attention quick by starting with the pain point. Whether its the client problem your product will solve, or the opportunity that your solution will capitalize on, focus on your audience’s concerns from the start line.

Motivational/Aspirational

A motivational presentation’s goal is to inspire the audience towards actions that will result in a positive change for them. Powerful narratives focus on the end-goal, painting a picture of what life will be like if these actions are undertaken.

Annual Sales Kick-Off meetings usually take this shape, but so do self-help seminars. Aspirational presentations find themselves at home in many different venues.

Motivational speeches benefit from dynamic presenting and especially a refrain-focused cadence that can become a sort of rallying cry.

Informative

Probably the most common presentation purpose in corporate communication, informative presentations can be the most difficult to keep engaging. Remember, if the audience is not engaged in an informative presentation, you have failed in the goal of sharing that information.

Creative narrative is crucial to sharing information effectively. Include context for the information: What caused this? What does it mean moving forward?

Setting information into context for the audience will help them connect with the information and seat it into their memory.

5. How important is a good template to good presentation design?

If you work at an organization with multiple slide producers, a well-built presentation template can elevate your internally-produced presentations at the same time that they alleviate stress on your team. It’s a win-win.

Templates are not just set fonts and colors, but instead can function as full presentation toolkits for your internal team. Ranging from simple to very complex, decide what will work best for your team and have a template built to suit.

Importance of brand identity

A company’s visual identity is its face to the world. Brands are such a big part of our world that people can often recognize brands just based on color pairings. It follows that a cohesive visual representation is crucial for a business.

With a well built template, internal slide-producers have a tool that makes brand adherence a breeze. From hard-coded theme colors, to custom fonts, to brand-approved elements and images, a template is a toolkit for better slides.

Ease of production

Not only will slides be higher quality, but a well-built template also increases speed and productivity. With pre-built layouts, easy-to-use assets and graphs, and approved icons for copy & paste, internal slide-producers will spend less time creating presentations and more time on their actual job responsibilities.

A warning about non-expert templates

Beware: Templates are complex creatures and those built by novices in presentation software often fall short in functionality. Do not ask your marketing agency or your internal team to attempt a template unless your needs are very minimal.

True presentation agencies will have expertise in presentation building. For instance, SlideRabbit keeps up on the appropriate literature and attends conferences on the subject.

6. How do I find the right design agency?

Not every agency is right for every client. Think first about your needs. Do you prioritize speed of production? Quality of visuals? Help with narrative and comprehension?

Different presentation design agencies specialize in different things and you will find a continuum of performance in your major deciding factors. Ask about the following as you weigh your options:

Design Level

Are you looking for a brand re-envisioning? Or do you just need some clean up on your diagrams? Different firms offer different ranges of design, and this is a crucial factor. Hiring a high-design shop for minimal clean up isn’t great for your wallet, and a clean-up shop will not be able to accommodate the need for a new sophisticated look & feel.

Turnaround time

Need slight clean up over night? It is possible – check out overseas options where people can work during their day times to clean up slides as North American sleeps.

Looking for something more purposeful? Make sure you have a firm idea on your timeline and that it will work for the presentation design agencies you’re considering.

It stands to reason that price of services will be affected by the above categories of quality and turnaround time. It is true that nothing is ever all three: Beautiful, Fast, and Cheap. Make sure you know where your priorities lie.

Are you looking for a dedicated project manager? Would you rather work directly with a designer? Do you want an agency that has oversight and quality checks built into their process?

Ask questions about project intake, delivery and communication. Will the practices of the firm work well for your working process?

Beyond just the quality of the samples, are the samples something that fits with your vision? While design agencies are adept at adjusting to brand and style, it’s also important that preferred styles align.

Template expertise

If you are looking for a template, it is vital to select an agency that specializes in the deeply technical intricacies of PowerPoint (or GoogleSlides, depending on your preference). Many marketing agencies will include a “template” in a brand package, but these are usually not built at all by the standards and will not be an efficient tool for a corporate team.

7. SlideRabbit Services

Working with a presentation agency can be daunting. Once you’ve used located a shop or two that might work for you, how does it work?

At SlideRabbit, we aim to make our client’s lives as easy as possible. Many of our clients are busy C-Suite professionals or marketers that have a lot on their plate. To help them get back to their real jobs, we can take presentation production off  the to do list.

What exactly can we help with? Below are our services categories , but we build each project to suit the needs of the client and that specific presentation.

Narrative sculpting

Lost in the minutiae of your message? Seeing your audiences tune out? SlideRabbit can help with narrative so that messages grab the audience right away and keep their attention all the way through.

Our Creative Director, Bethany Auck , will review your materials, whether that be an existing presentation or an assortment of documents and work iteratively with your team to create an ideal narrative, along with identifying the content and visual approaches to support the messages.

Content & concept consulting

Are the visuals in your presentation working? Can the audience quickly understand them and do they aid in bolstering your main points? Is there too much text for your visuals to even be effective? Before it’s time to design the content, the visuals themselves need to be evaluated for efficacy.

While concept evaluation is a part of content design, we also offer round of evaluation here where SlideRabbit will present the client team with proposed concept lists, paired with a narrative outline.

Custom look & feel development

As we discussed above, brand adherence is crucial to maintaining the integrity of your visual identity. However, getting a presentation template from a branding agency is chancy. If an agency does not specialize in presentation, it’s unlikely that they have the software expertise to build a functional presentation file.

SlideRabbit is adept at creating presentation-appropriate expressions of your brand. While respecting and adhering to all brand standards, our designers create a presentation base file in accordance with the specifications of your preferred presentation software.

Event presentations

Looking to create more of a splash than the day-to-day brand expression? For events, or high-visibility decks, SlideRabbit will work with any event branding, any custom screen sizes, and any other venue needs.

Event presentations are an exciting opportunity to push a typical presentation even further. SlideRabbit provides custom animation, even animated 2D videos if desired!

Custom templates

Nearly every company produces slides. However, many are working from broken, differentiated, or out-of-date templates. In order for a company to produce streamlined slides efficiently, a well-built template is the first step.

SlideRabbit builds custom templates from the ground up,. Each is customized to brand guidelines with modern and sleek design. Additionally, we are experts in PPT and Google Slides functionality as well as extras to build in for additional functionality and productivity tools.

Content design

Lackluster slides? SlideRabbit provides content design as our main service. Content design projects do not need to include redesigns or templates – we will happily take in any deck and provide professional design improvements for the content.

Content design can include all sorts of improvements from the basics like alignment and standards to diagrams, graphs, animation, imagery, and all manner of design elements in order to elevate the final product. We are happy to work within an existing corporate template or established look & feel.

All of our content design is fully editable and natively built in with PowerPoint or Google Slides. That means our clients do not need to come back to us for edits, and can update their slides as needed. Of course, we are always here to help with any edit rounds, with no project minimums for existing clients.

Additional marketing collateral

While 90% of the work we do is in presentation software, we also supply additional marketing materials like long-form reports , event branding, signage, and swag.

For those with smaller marketing needs, we can be your one-stop-shop.

Workshops & training

Our partnership does not end when we complete a project or template. SlideRabbit offers a full range of training options and will build a customized curriculum around an organizations specific goals.

Our workshops and training sessions range from basic software skills, to technical deep dives, to workshops on how to think and execute like a presentation designer.

The attendee feedback indicates that 99% of attendees would recommend the sessions and learned something they could use immediately. Contact us to discuss your presentation training needs.

Are you ready to up your presentation game and simplify your life? Let us help !

SlideRabbit is an elite presentation agency that creates killer presentations. From narrative sculpting to slide design to template construction, we help our clients show up looking their best.

All  presentation design  is custom for each client, fully editable, and brand adherent. We work in both PowerPoint and Google Slides.

Looking to train up your team? We also provide  workshops , ranging from technical training to how to think like a presentation designer .

Reach us at  [email protected] .

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