Getting ready to create and give a presentation? If you’re feeling nervous, don’t worry. We’ve got all the presentation design tips you need to create and deliver a stellar presentation every single time.
Watch the video below to learn more about all of the design tips and elements you need to keep in mind when creating your presentation deck. Then get started building your own presentation with Visme.
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Beginner
Worried about losing your audience in the middle of your presentation? Well, worry no more.
Hello world! I’m Mike Ploger and here at Visme, we specialize in spicing up presentations to wake up even the sleepiest of audiences. After all, the biggest fear for any presenter is standing front and center, all eyes on him/her and losing an audience just moments into the presentation.
We’ve stressed over the possibility of sleep or phones stealing our audience and I’m here to help you make sure that doesn’t happen.
In this video, I’ll share 13 proven presentation design tips that will have your audience talking about your presentation for all the right reasons. Shall we?
An easy way to lose a viewer early in a presentation is by overloading slides with too much information.
Think of a slide as an individual room. If a room is filled with clutter, you’ll likely want to turn around and walk out. Well the same can be said for a presentation, but with slides, you can have as many rooms as you want.
Do your best to keep one idea or thought to a single slide. If it’s a longer section, just break it up. You can have a title on one slide and small bits of information on the next. You can lay out a process with one step per slide.
Look here with this slide template available right now in Visme. It cleanly displays what customers are saying about a product. Uncluttered, to the point and visually appealing — you can’t ask for much more.
If you’ve watched our videos before, you’ve heard me say this and I’ll reiterate it once again. Stick to no more than two or three fonts .
Take a look at our examples. Each of these slides uses just two fonts. A thin sans serif for the quotes in purple and a serif for the subjects who said them.
Three fonts can be a reach, so we recommend two. One for your headlines, and one for your body copy. However, three can work if you want to add an accent to certain elements. Any more is just another way for a design to feel clutter.
And don’t use two fonts for one slide then two different fonts for the next and two more after that. Pick a couple fonts from the very beginning and stick with them throughout your entire presentation.
Visual hierarchy is an important design element. So much so that we created an entire video to ensure you’re doing it properly. Put simply, visual hierarchy is the order of importance assigned to the elements in a design. What should your audience see first, second, third and so on.
There are certain tips you can use to assign hierarchy which is why I encourage you to check out the video for yourself. You don’t want one of the most vital pieces of your design to be skipped over.
Now, there’s really no need to fill a slide with walls of texts. If that was the case, your information probably could’ve been provided in an email. Keep your slides to a couple main points and use your voice to dive deeper into those topics.
That’s exactly what we see here with these examples. Of course, it does require a bit more preparation, but laziness will always hurt a presentation. If you’re not giving a presentation live or maybe want to hear from a guest, implement audio into the slides themselves.
Visme’s presentation maker allows you to do this with ease. You can record your audio straight into the dashboard. Just one of the many reasons Visme is your place for presentation building.
Nothing will make your audience yawn quite like bullet points . They’ve become somewhat standard in presentations but there are so many other ways to list information without boring your audience.
Take a look here. Rather than using bullet points, this template uses individual icons paired alongside the short lines of texts. While it’s the same idea as a bullet point, it adds some flare to the design, making it more pleasing.
Whatever you do, just stay away from those long lists of plain black bullet points. Please.
If you’re giving a presentation at a convention and dozens, if not hundreds, of people will be there, create strong contrast in your presentation.
Yes, black and white is about as strong of contrast as it gets, but try to be more creative than that. Your text should really pop and stand out from the background.
If you’re having a hard time seeing it from your own screen, it will be even worse for those in the back of a large room. And if you have more questions about color, great timing!
Just like we do with fonts, it’s easy to get carried away with colors. The sky blue looks great but so does that lime green or what about the royal orange or raspberry red?
Slow down. Find two or three colors you like from the jump and stick with them.
This image uses different shades of blue but also pops of red. You see wonderful contrast in that pop of red where the creator wants you to look. Again, it can be easy to stress over color but try not to.
If you have a company brand, stick with those colors. It’ll help associate the presentation with your company.
I mentioned adding audio to slides earlier and you can actually do the same with video.
There are several benefits to doing so. You get to take a break from talking, the presentation becomes more interactive and perhaps there is somebody out there that already said something perfectly.
Don’t worry, it won’t take away from your expertise. If anything, it’ll actually show that you’ve done your research.
Noticing a theme yet? The fewer of one element, the better.
Images are just another way to overwhelm or confuse a viewer. Don’t overdo it. Stick to one per slide. Luckily for you, there are several ways to incorporate photos into slides. It could be a slightly faded background image or an accent image or maybe it’s paired with a color overlay. The choice is all yours!
This creator did an excellent job of bringing her topic to life and making it seem more real when images of giraffes while discussing threats to wildlife. It tugs at your heartstrings seeing actual wildlife in the presentation.
Maybe it goes unsaid for a lot of you, but too many times have we seen presentations which included low quality graphics. Any illustration that’s blurry or pixelated should not be included in your presentation.
If the only graphic you can find on your information is blurry, that’s when you go to Visme. Our library has hundreds of graphics, shapes and icons that are ready to use. All you have to do is plug in your own information and your presentation is ready to go.
When simple graphics don’t do the trick, use data visualization. These are the bar charts or process maps or other infographics that make statistics easy to understand.
If this wasn’t a bar graph, but was really just a list of numbers in a spreadsheet, it’d be much more difficult to understand the growth of the company. But by visualizing data, an audience will grasp a point without much effort at all.
I mentioned how adding audio or video are just a couple of ways of making a presentation more interactive . But you can also start with an ice breaker, poll your audience, encourage movement, use music — the list goes on and on and on.
And you can actually watch a video where I cover 15 different ways to make your presentation more interactive. You want to churn the wheels in your audiences’ brains. And making it more interactive is a great place to start.
And lastly, when transitioning from slide to slide, don’t pull down one slide then slide left the next. Keep all the same. Don’t worry, it’s not overused or boring. Using several transitions and animations actually makes a presentation look unprofessional.
And for animation, only worry about animating the most important elements of your presentation. You don’t need to add movement to every slide just for the heck of it. Again, simple is better.
Okay! You’re ready! Time to put your head down and get to work. If you’re still worried or hesitant on where to begin, head on over to Visme. Seriously. The tools available will blow your way. And eventually will do the same for your audience.
Also, check out our channel to see how else we can help. There are likely more tips in there that can drive you toward impactful designs.
Thank you so much for watching and good luck with your next presentation. I have faith in you. With Visme, I’m Mike Ploger, helping you Make Information Beautiful.
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