The spread of PowerPoint has made the company’s presentations all too routine. It can be challenging to capture your audience’s attention with regular slides full of character points. It may be a useful tool in some situations, but tons of other presentation solutions can help you engage with your audience and talk about key ideas.
While traditional tools like PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Keynote can all be used to create presentations, you can break the standard approach – essential points on simple slides – by inserting images, creating movement, and limiting each slide or essential category only a few points.
If you are looking to shake things up and connect with your audience in a fun and engaging way, it might be time to try one of these solutions.
Here are the top 7 Digital Publishing & Presentation tools
Tips to Make Your Presentation More Creative
Designing a splendid and compelling presentation can be daunting, especially if you are not a designer. It is even more challenging to create a presentation for your startup, knowing, for example, that you will be entering the field of an investor or standing in a room in front of an important business meeting.
When there’s a potential deal on the table, the pressure is on! In this tutorial, we will reveal ten tips for designing powerful presentations. Find out how to create a better presentation layout.
The strategies explained later help craft a short and relevant presentation to prepare your presentation for any business presentation. Launching itself is challenging, and the best, well-designed collections back the most formidable displays. The purpose of a good investor presentation is to:
- Present a message clearly, including only the critical points.
- Offer the necessary context so that people have what they need to make a decision.
- Conclude that the next action steps are, including your questions, after giving your presentation.
All of the above points need to be supported by a concise narrative that tells your business’s story, assisted by well-crafted slides.
A Photo (Shocking) is Worth a Thousand Words.
First of all, never underestimate the power of stunning photography in your presentation design.
Photography is a powerful tool to convey your message visually. Whether it is an emotional photo to share a powerful message or a great product photo to convince about your product’s value or striking images that enhance opaque slides, photography is useful in many situations.
Presentation Tips: Remember to consider your slides as support material while you are presenting. You want the crowd to pay their attention to you and your narrative and, on a secondary level, to your slides presentation. Not the other way around.
Try to keep only one photo for each topic you do. It is often enough to help you tell a story and get your message across.
It is very convenient to keep text to a minimum in your presentation. This way, you are sure that people are paying attention to you rather than being distracted by the over-the-top design of your slides.
Photography can be used in a very creative way. For example, a few presentation templates use the shape of a brush as a mask for photography to give photography in slide designs a creative vibe. Please keep your message clear and increase it with a touch of creativity.
Use Correct Colors and White Space as well.
The color
When you begin to learn how to design, colors and the effective use of white space are among the first, if not some, of the topics that should be covered. Because design equates to effective communication, you can understand the importance of colors and white space in your presentation designs.
Learning how to use colors effectively is challenging if you are starting to design. This is why it is essential to find color schemes that will do the job for you. Or work on a presentation template design that is already designed, as these have a ready-made color scheme.
If your business has a style guide, then you can use that as a basis for choosing the correct colors from that guide. If not, you can use a website such as Adobe Color, which has an excellent selection of color schemes ready.
The contrast
Contrast is something that you should also keep in mind, especially when designing presentations. You must be sure that your text reads clearly. You can ensure this by having enough contrast between your slide background color (which is usually white or light gray) and having the book in a reverse color (such as black, for example).
If you are adding text to your photo, readability becomes even more critical. You can guarantee this, for example, by adding a black color with Overlay layer mode and a transparency of 60%. This makes the image darker and makes the text lighter to read.
You can also use contrast to capture people’s attention. For example, using black as a background color and yellow for text creates a strong contrast. The effective use of difference, mainly when used strategically throughout your presentation, helps people pay attention to the moments when you want to draw their attention.
Whitespace
Finally, you have a blank. The easiest way to deal with white space, effectively, is to give your slides plenty of room to breathe.
The concept is straightforward; just don’t put too many items on a single slide. Give each item on a decline enough space. This makes your slip easier to digest. If not, your slides will look unprofessional and disorganized, and you’ll only end up confusing your audience.
Say No to Animations (Especially)
One of the trickiest aspects of designing perfect slides is the use of animations. In general, the use of animations is not recommended due to:
- They tend to slow down your presentation, especially if you add an animated transition between each slide.
- Also, they tend to distract the audience even though you are building a plot or story.
- Finally, they can look cheesy even though you are dealing with a professional context (such as asking a potential investor for funds).
There are scenarios in which animations make sense, for example, if you are highlighting certain functionality of a product, or if you are building a story with illustrations, or even in a subtle way, animating graphics or statistics.
In those scenarios, animation helps a great deal with your goals. However, if you are using animations to use animations, it means your presentation will likely be better without any of it.
Prepare the Typography and Effective Content.
In any presentation, your content matters more than your design. This is why, even in a list of presentation design tips, I would still like to emphasize that you should feel like a solid rock when it comes to the content you present.
To design a slide more efficiently, it will help first to prepare its content separately. Learn more about it by reading: How to Write Your PowerPoint Presentation before designing your presentation. Work on the summary of the message (s) and the story you bring with you. You can then use that as a base to start designing.
Simultaneously, too, it is essential to use the correct typography to present your content. Sans-serif style fonts are usually highly recommended because they are traditionally the most legible on digital screens. Here is a balanced slide design from Professional Investor PowerPoint Templates.
It is also important that the fonts are the correct size. Therefore, make sure that the font size is large enough so that everyone can read the text on your slides in the context in which you are presenting. If you are launching in a huge conference room, then the person at the end of the table should still be able to continue watching your presentation without a problem.
Be witty (or even funny )
Now that you have less to do with visual design, it’s still essential to keep one tip in mind.
The most effective presentations are the ones that are most outstanding and unforgettable. Especially when it is known where you will be competing against others who are starting, this is important. Your goal is for your audience to remember you and your message after the presentation.
This is why emotional design often helps create an excellent presentation. If you connect with people emotionally, your viewers will remember your presentation much more than the average person who “gives” a presentation.
You can click on the emotional nerve, usually in two ways:
- Being funny: by making people laugh, you will automatically make them feel more positive about your telling story. This is a powerful cognitive dissonance. The risk is, though, not sounding like a comedian – remember you’re still addressing yourself in a professional context, but a laugh now and then is a welcome relief.
- Being resourceful: If you surprise people by providing new ideas, then they will remember your presentation better, just as you provide value on a personal level to the audience.
In other words, focus on exciting angles for your content. If you can provide valuable ideas or present serious topics from a single pitch, this will help you stand out from the crowd rather than offer a more business presentation.
You have 20 minutes.
Whenever you spend time concentrating on a single task, we consider this to be your attention span.
On average, we have a 20-minute attention span on a task, which we are not motivated to complete in essence.
Keep this in mind when it comes to your presentation. Most presentations are limited to a predetermined time. However, you should have the option to present for an hour, but it is ideal to try to stay with only 20 minutes.
This forces you to make your message more concise and keep people interested for such a long time because their minds are relaxed. Once you pass the 20-minute point, it becomes more difficult to convince people of your service or product’s novel value.
Apply the Rule of Three
Another psychological trick is that people tend to remember everything when it comes in pairs of three. You can read more about it on Wikipedia.
An example of how to apply the rule of three can describe the benefits of a splendid, sustainable, and high-quality product.
This can be very useful when you are designing your slides. If you are adding keywords or benefits or any other type of list on a slide, it will work much better if you summarize it in three elements (or add an extra element if you only have two).
As a rule of thumb, try to avoid bullet points or bullet points. For example, if you are highlighting the features of a product, in that case, it is much more convenient to add three great screenshots or illustrations of the product to your slide design rather than just writing your feature text.
Transmit a Single Message (Focused)
When you are designing a presentation, it is best to stick with just one message.
When you commit to focusing on a single message, it will help you put all your energy into making your point completely clear.
Practically, this translates into the following:
- What is the full message of my presentation?
- What is the message of my next slide?
The last question, the message of your slide, helps you identify the best possible design for your slide. The best design for a slide might be a few words, a great photo, or maybe just a number.
The easiest tip to apply is simple, use as little text as possible.
Tell interesting stories.
One aspect of your presentation design that you should always keep in mind is the notion of flow. The idea of flow is that the transition of each of your slides should be smooth. This is all about bringing in a great story, but ensuring your slide design, too, helps the importance of storytelling.
The introductory presentations offer a story. More than just listing facts and characteristics include a story that tends to engage people better. It’s often true that the best people in business make great storytellers.
For investor presentations, you typically have a smooth presentation that looks something like the following:
- It begins by highlighting the problems of the product, problems that it is trying to solve. This is often accomplished by telling a story personally.
- The presentation usually includes photos to make it easier for people to view their stories.
- The following is the presentation of the product and how exactly the product solved the problem.
- Then, include data to support the points you made.
- Finally, there is a plan for how the product ultimately becomes a profitable business.
As you can see, any well thought out presentation has a number of stories that you will tell the audience. Consider this is becoming your table of contents for your presentation. In the examples above, this is:
- The problem
- The solution
- A Practical Plan
Now each story that you are telling often requires different slide layouts to help enhance the story. For the example above, this could be the following:
- The Problem: Photographs primarily and data slides offer visual aid and evidence.
- The Solution: Mainly text and illustrative slides using the rule of three to provide content.
- A Practical Plan: Slides are usually built with a single message, whether this is a number, a strategy, or a graphic that helps to convince the most interested parties.
When you think of your presentations as a collection of stories, then they will help you determine what type of slide design package will best help you tell your story most transparently.
Extraordinary End.
If you can do all of the above, you have already done a fantastic job. If you are still looking for that little extra “touch” that makes a difference, then make the end of your presentation unforgettable, that’s the difference.
The most famous example would be that of Apple, the way Steve Jobs concluded his presentation with “one more thing” by making another, even more, exciting announcement during his Keynotes product.
Giving the notion that your presentation is about to end, only to conclude with something more amazing (like the number of active users or a unique feature you are about to launch, for example), will ensure that your message will rub off them.
A surprise is a powerful tool. Presenting impressive facts for the moment, only to have the audience still wait until the last one is how you just gave a fantastic presentation.
