In a conference room, you are standing in front of a company’s high officials who are seated with their eyes fixed on you. You are there to give a presentation of a few ideas and strategies to increase the revenue of the company. You hit the enter button of your laptop and a bright yellow slide with red heavy text appears on the projector screen. The screen will look ghastly and won’t work in your favor.
Crafting a presentation that is engaging, informative and pleasing to the eye is an art. Ansh Patel provides a visual guide on mastering the art and creating a clutter-breaking presentation
Plan
Like any good presentation, plan what you are going to speak about and make a brief list of points which you want the presentation slides to summarise. Planning the content of your presentation beforehand will ensure that slides are not disjointed to the average viewer and will also make the actual process of making them a lot smoother.
Select A Simple, Readable Font
Too many people make presentation slides with fancy fonts and effects with the misguided notion of impressing their audience. If you’re giving a presentation, chances are the audience is interested in the content rather than the glossiness of the presentation. Presenting it through a clean, simple font will ensure there will be minimum barriers between the point you’re trying to make through the slide and your audience.
- This is a simple and readable font
- Stylish fonts like this will make larger paragraphs a headache to read
- Writing in brief points like this works
- Helps you to remember the points during the presentation.
- Abandoning bullet points and simply filling your slides with MORE content isn’t going to help the flow of those reading these slides even if you happen to include bold or underlined letters, it will still end up being too much of a wall of text that will put the readers off reading.
Bullets Are Your Friends, Paragraphs Your For
Slides are also not meant for packing as many sentences into one as possible. Paragraphs, often called walls of text, can easily make the audience lose interest in the slide and thus what you are saying. It is essential to present your content in simple bullet points which makes it easy for both the audience while serving its dual purpose of a quick script for your own speech.
TOPIC 1
Some text about “Topic 1”
TOPIC 2
Sub-Topic 2.1
– This slide feels weird already
TOPIC 3
Sub-Topic 3.1
– Quite an overkill already
Sub-Topic 3.2
– Mashing more topics into one slide only shows how poorly organized your slides are
One Topic Per Slide
Some presentation slides overkill it by including far too many headings and sub-headings within a single slide. This violates the ‘Never Overwhelm Your Audience’ rule of presentations and thus needs to be countered by keeping it restricted to one topic per slide. Ensure it’s neither too packed nor too empty.
Balance Alignment With Design
Use alignment sparingly as it can often mess with the flow. Ensure both the font size and style remain consistent with your design throughout the presentation.
- Alignment = Design
- It is a good idea to stick to a single alignment
- Instead of using different alignments within the same slide
- As it can potentially disturb the flow of the reader
Everybody Loves Pictures
Human beings are visual creatures by nature and your audience may often find it difficult to understand the more complex aspects of your presentation. Including visuals such as schematics, graphs, pie charts or even embedded videos can capture the attention of the bored as well as get your point across to everyone.
Get To The Point
Presentations turn into a drag if the speaker does not get to the point quickly. Introduce your key idea as early as possible and make a mental note to not meander at any one point for far too long. There’s no point giving a presentation to a sleeping audience, is there?
Slide 152 of 152
- You are doing it wrong if you are making these many slides
- Either you will spend a LOT of time talking or a LOT of time changing slides.
- Or your audience will doze off before you even reach your main point
Beyond Technology Involve The Audience
Asking questions and quick opinion polls by the count of hands keeps your audience engaged. This can break from the monotony of a single person speaking.
Keep It Short
Ensure your presentation doesn’t exceed 20 minutes as in this age of high attention deficiency, the audience can quickly get bored and lose interest in what you’re saying.
Remain The Centre
No matter how expertly you make slides, technology still cannot supersede the importance of you, the speaker, who should remain the centre of attention. Do not read from the slides, be confident and put your point across, and you will have a killer presentation on your hands.
Preparing a presentation is going to be an integral part of any corporate job you take up. Thus, it is crucial to understand the importance and master the skills of preparing a perfect powerpoint presentation.
